“I started out doing posters for the theater. It’s almost the same thing as a book cover: the promise of an experience. It has to show you what you’re in for, without spelling it out.”
I have a ridiculous one-of-a-kind book collection, which has a lot of fantastic reference material: books on how to make balsa wood airplanes, to encyclopedias of infectious rashes from the Vietnam War era. You never know what you’re going to find. Sometimes while you’re reading a book you just start looking at things. If you’re stumped, that’s one way to do it. I used to need to “make it happen” more. I’d go to the library and pull books off the shelves randomly without looking, and then I’d just look. It could be a book on the geography of the great lakes and there’s something in there visually that makes you go, “Oh yeah! I can use this.” So much design research now is Google image searches. I never go there for material because that’s where everyone else is going.