"The Art of Urban Cycling"

One of my favorite book covers I've designed, in part because I created this very colorful collage with photos from a great friend of mine, in addition to those supplied by the author. I also really like my typography, the tone and design fully supporting the text and the interior design. I really dislike it when a book cover is designed by someone and the interior is designed by someone else because it's harder to coordinate a total "look," but that is the way most books are produced. With my long career and "reputation," I have usually been able to design the entire book, and I like to think my books are better for it.

M Y  B O O K   D E S I G N S — "The Art of Urban Cycling," ©2004, is one of the last books I designed working full-time for GPP, the Globe Pequot Press. The text is, as the title implies, all about how to safely pilot your bike through crowded city streets. The interior is black and white in this paperback book, but I was determined to make the design very eye-catching anyway. I decided on a graffiti-theme early on, and had my friend (and loyal blog lurker, lol) Meghan, who works in Manhattan, spend a few lunch hours walking around the lower East Side shooting photos for me. I incorporated them into collages and along with author-supplied photographs, charts and graphs, produced a compelling looking, and reading, book. It was a critical success, if, unfortunately  not so much in sales. I call this the "Arrested Development" school of success: The critics loved it but it was ultimately cancelled, lol.

Each chapter opened with a 2-page spread and collage of photos relating to the chapter's contents. I should have re-read this chapter prior to my bike accident this summer, the effects of which I'm still dealing with.

"Regular" interior pages carried subheads and drop caps in this style, and I created several stand-alone full page collages to facilitate page flow. Yes, I found a way to create a car-collage in this bicycling book! 

• The Amazon link to The Art of Urban Cycling, including many rave reader reviews. Two years after this first edition, and after I left the company to go freelance and to work on my personal art, the cover was redesigned to better fit in with the series, but it lost its uniqueness if you ask me. I'm linking to my original edition. lol.