Two Degrees - Cover Story

I had no preconception of the cover for Two Degrees, although I knew I wanted to the image of Mia’s tattoo inside the book and as a logo. I thus started the design process by working with my old friend Lorenzo Contessa o the central image for the book, the flower tattoo. But for the cover, I went back to 99designs and submitted a brief to potential designers that contains too many spoilers to repeat here, but which includes the book’s themes of climate change and flash floods, power politics and environmental activism. The submissions took many directions.

The Flower Logo

Original sketch for Flower Logo

Some of the Submissions:

After what seemed like not enough time, I had to select finalists to work with for the last days of the design contest:

At any rate, this was the mocked-up cover used to create the galley copy of the book for use in proofreading:

Polling my friends and beta readers produced no clear winner, so in the end I had to choose, and selected the design submitted by Nanne, who I would only then learn is a designer based in the Philippines. The design went through a few more changes, like after my editor convinced me no one would understand the headline for the back-cover text: Rapacity & Resistance in the Anthropocene.

…And ended in the final cover design: