I really enjoyed making the cover for this (my first) book with Paul Cureton. We had discussed many types of cover and even gathered together various images that we might use, mostly they were centred around mapping and satellite imagery. But when it came down to it I felt most were not quite right and not representing mine and Paul’s connections. We could have got Taylor and Francis to do the cover, and they are really good at this but again we wanted the book to reflect us and our work.
So I looked again at our work and what brought us together, a map of Lancaster was an obvious choice and whilst we love the 3D data we procured and released as OpenData of Lancaster and Morecambe (our Lancaster City Information Model). OpenData was big draw and so too was our love of mapping. I felt a diagrammatic more abstract cover maybe the way forward. We are also fans of not having to spend money so an obvious choice was a dataset we were already familiar with, Ordnance Survey’s amazing Open Zoomstack is the dataset we chose.
So I basically started playing with the symbology of a map of Lancaster a place we are both familiar with using colour combinations that were brighter and colourful as we both wanted an eye catching book. Knowing that we needed some space for a title and author names, having a coastal element seemed a good idea so of course I had to look at siting this around Morecambe. It seemed natural to flip the map so that we had a good clear space for the book so that’s what I ended up doing.
The final bit I added was colourful bars around the text, it was sort of meant to represent the dashboards we are familiar with representing data metrics but it also allow us to tie the book together nicely as well.
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