Cover Story

Yesterday I had a brief conversation with Dan Cohen at THATCamp. In collaboration with Tom Scheinfeldt, Dan is part way through the process of selecting the submissions that will be included in the Hacking the Academy anthology. Obviously, the "Book Created Collaboratively in One Week, May 21-28, 2010" won't be created in one week.

During the week in which the project was open to submissions, I posted a study for a book cover and created a less official remix of the design, intertwining it with a loose yarn of random graphic association I'd been spinning at a small online venue.

More recently, I've reworked the same patterns here, here and here.

The patterns used in these designs are lifted from a poster I had completed shortly before the week of the Hacking the Academy project. The poster's unusual shapes were an artefact of vectorising an earlier bitmap experiment from 2006, which in turn was a reworking of a bitmap graphic from 2005. This original progenitor of the whole series juxtaposes two things: a screen capture taken of a graphics card failure and a Photoshop palette derived from a photograph.

For some reason, I've always delighted in cannibalising earlier work.

None of the above will need to have anything to do with the eventual cover. Dan agreed to get in touch when they're ready to discuss the design. I'm looking forward to that.

■ Related: The UCLDH logo: A brief history