Thank, Thank Hugo

An alternative version of the cover. It was hard to choose!

As the Beatles discovered in working with George Martin, no artist is an island, and I have Mr. Hugo Campos to thank for the great book cover (and web site header) he designed. Hugo and I met years ago while working at a San Francisco digital ad agency. In fact, I recommended we NOT hire him. Not the first or last mistake I’ve made because Hugo can pretty much design anything you give him with a phenomenal result – and he always does it with a concerted effort, thoughtful rationale, and a keen eye.

E-book cover design is still in its infancy, with no standard yet set. If you look at the Kindle Store or iBookstore, you’ll notice that, for a majority of the titles, a lot of the text is unreadable on the book cover thumbnails. This would normally get most designers fired, but the reason for that is the major publishers are just repurposing the covers used for their standard book publishing (just goes to show you how old school they are). Really they should be designing a separate version for their e-book releases.

Anyway, Hugo managed to come up with a design that I thought a) best captures the essence of the subject matter and the era and b) works very well with the e-book format, so he very much “pleased pleased” me.

Hugo is a leading light in the patient rights’ movement to secure the data outputted by their medical devices. Check out his very interesting TEDx talk.