© Daniel Will Harris

Thinking in Java book cover

I designed this book cover for an author and friend who loves the craftsman style from the turn of the century. I created what looks like a wooden insect specimen box, and filled it with bugs (appropriate for programming, no?) from David Curry's excellent collection of clip art.

I used Xara's fill feature to fill objects with the wood pattern (also from the Xara collection), and chose the Rennie Mackintosh typeface from itcfonts.com because it's a wonderful art nouveau typeface based on the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a Scottish designer. Adding the "red lacquer" background gave it an oriental feeling, which is also appropriate for the period.

This cover was so complicated, with literally thousands of pieces, and dozens of layers, that at first it wouldn't output correctly to the imagesetter (a problem I've only ever encountered with Xara this time—but then I doubt any other program would have been able to output it). I used Xara's "create bitmap" feature to convert the thousands of background pieces into a single large high-res bitmap, then I turned on the bugs and the type layers on top of it and output it, and it came out perfectly.