We just heard that pre-orders of our first ever physical book, Future Cities, started arriving yesterday. Now that the book is starting to reach people’s hands, we wanted to share the story behind our cover design. It was created by Minneapolis designer Caroline Royce, who has designed a lot of stuff for us. What many people may not know is that she actually presented us with 5 cover options, all so great that we spent weeks debating which one to choose, ultimately letting the publisher cast the final vote. We wanted to share her other designs with our readers, and we asked her to share the story behind each one.

About the one we chose, above:

“I stuck with the theme of cities but this time did something way more clean and modern. When I first started getting to know The Tangential and the aesthetic they like, it’s very much this. Minimal and fun, and (specifically) little icons. There are nods to several different city skylines in this, including a few Minneapolis bridges, which seemed rather appropriate.”

“I wanted to evoke something old-fashioned (like, 1920’s) and futuristic at the same time – think Metropolis or the cover of Atlas Shrugged. My execution, though, is a tad flawed. It doesn’t have nearly the level of depth I had in mind. Still, it has something vaguely Emerald City-ish, which is cool, and the type is my favorite part.”

“I had no idea what was going to be in the book when I did this project. All I had was the title and a little blurb for the back cover. I took that as creative freedom, so I tried something really far out of my comfort zone and made something totally pulpy and fun. I also learned a ton of new stuff just by doing. I wanted to stick with the retro-futurism look, but from a totally different era and something just silly and fantastical.”

“I’m totally blanking on what I can say about this one. It was just a simple thing to do; it’s fun and vintage-y, which is, to the core, my style. I was probably so wiped out from the previous two that I kind of phoned this one in.” (Note: This one was our other favorite.)

“This idea is only half-complete. I should’ve added more to communicate that this is the moon where one day, there will be cities of people living on it. Back in the 1960’s, they thought this kind of thing was not far off. I wanted to pay homage to that era, where anything was possible (and obviously too because everything I do is ‘retro’). Although, I do find this very simplified image to be effective in its own way.”

Did we make the right choice? We’ll maybe never know.

–Becky Lang and Caroline Royce