KU design professor lets students in on book cover illustration job for big publisher

LAWRENCE — Baseball executive Branch Rickey is credited with the saying: “Luck is the residue of design.” And if you believe that, it can hardly be called luck that an art director from Simon & Schuster called Matthew Cook out of the blue a year ago, asking if he’d like to create the cover art for a forthcoming book aimed at pre-teens.

Today, as the result of the hard work that both preceded and followed that call, the book featuring Cook’s cover artwork, J.A. Dauber’s “Press 1 for Invasion,” was published by Aladdin, a Simon & Schuster imprint.

Cook is an assistant professor in the University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design, and, along the way, he shared his experience working with one of America’s “big five" publishers to give his students a taste of the state of the art in commercial art and design in 2025.

And while the team at Simon & Schuster offered a constant stream of artistic suggestions as he worked on the main illustration, Cook said there were practical considerations, too, like leaving space for the cover’s commercial elements, such as blurbs and retail information, and how the printing process would affect the illustration.

The process started with an email.

“They came across some of my work on my portfolio website, and the art director said it had the look they were after, which was pretty cool,” Cook said. “It doesn't happen that way very often.”

Cook said the executive he worked with most closely, Dan Potash, vice president and creative director of S&S’s children's division, “mentioned specifically the cinematic lighting and the bright, interesting colors in my work. And so that was some of the art direction that I got early on.”

First, Potash sent Cook an early version of Dauber’s text to read. The protagonist, Cook said, is a middle schooler named Matt “who wants a cell phone really bad, and his parents won't let him have it. So he's walking to school one day, and he finds a cell phone on the ground ... But it turns out that it just looks like a cell phone. It's some kind of alien technology. And so, as he starts to play with it, it starts to do unexpected things. ... Then he discovers there's this plot to take over the Earth, and he has to use his newfound connections with these aliens to deal with that situation.”

Dauber hadn’t even finished writing the book when Cook began to work on the cover, but the artist had his parameters.

“There's the saying about not judging a book by its cover, but it makes a huge difference,” Cook said. “Sales are massively influenced based on what's on the cover. It also gives you a sense of what to expect from the book — if it's bright and colorful or dark and spooky.”

That turned out to be a fine line to walk, Cook said. He started by producing “30 or 40” rough illustrations that he calls “thumbnails.” Then he proceeded to make more detailed “sketches” based on the feedback he received. At some point, he turned any remaining hand drawings into easily manipulable representations using the Wacom digital drawing tool and Adobe Photoshop.

Cook said the art director “wanted to have a big, eye-grabbing title. ... He definitely wanted a phone on there somehow. He wanted a kid on there somehow. And then the rest of it was kind of up to me to think about what it would be.”

Later, these discussions became more detailed. How to make the cell phone recognizable, but also imply its alien technology? Should the protagonist’s ethnicity be recognizable? How realistic? How scary should the alien look?

Cook said he took inspiration for his alien from images of deep-sea creatures.

“It's not a horror movie,” Cook said. “It's more of an adventure and ... fun kind of challenge story. So we didn't want giant, dripping teeth or anything like that. But I like the idea of eyes, because it's this thing watching you, and it kind of connects with the phone. And I liked something to do with the tentacles and something that didn't have a specific face necessarily. So that's what led in this direction.”

Cook said he is pleased with the final product.

“I think a lot of this job is either building relationships with folks or just somebody kind of finding you, and then trying to be as professional and easy to work with as you can be,” he said. “So all these changes and stuff ... at the end of the day, I want to be like, ‘Whatever you need. I'm going to work hard. I'm here to help you.’ Because this is their product. They're hiring me to make what they want. So I'm doing my best to give them that and to be pleasant to go back and forth on that stuff with. Dan, the art director, was very understanding and gave me lots of great feedback. It was really nice working with him.”