Quick background: In 2010, I created a process called the design sprint, and in 2012, I brought it to Google Ventures. Since then, my fellow partners and I have run more than one hundred sprints with GV startups. Many people read our posts about the method and asked us to write a book with more stories and a how-to guide. So we did! You can find Sprint in bookstores now.

Last June, with a near-complete draft of our book in hand, we began thinking about the cover design. We’re a team of designers, so how hard could it be? (Spoiler alert: Turns out it is very, very hard.)

We wanted to capture the promise of going from problem to solution with great speed. But we also wanted to avoid a “designer-y” cover. Sprint is not just a book for designers — we wrote it to be equally useful to an engineer, a teacher, a startup founder, or a student. The cover should invite readers who have never thought about design at all.

219 rough ideas

To begin, we “sketched” on the computer: each person using clip art and their favorite illustration tool (that’s Sketch for Braden Kowitz and Daniel Burka, and Keynote for me). We ended up with 200+ rough sketches and variations. Here are some examples: