It is an architectural photograph by Unsplash photographer Carl Nenzen Loven, which, after further research, I discovered features the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption in the Cathedral Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. Initially, I weighed the consequences of using an image of a church on the cover of a dystopian cyberpunk novel, but decided that the framing and lighting ambiguated the visual reference enough, and the finding out the location of the church was shared with the setting of the novel was enough circumstance to convince me to try it out as the primary cover image.

For the sake of argument, I also mocked up a series of covers with other images and non-photographic cover techniques, but once I started seriously working with the above image, there was no turning back.

I began laying out the mechanical, and quickly ran into a problem with type. In my mind, the book contents clearly called for a grotesque sans-serif with modern vibes, and for a while, I thought the best choice was the Brandon Grotesque, designed by Hannes von Döhren and the 2011 Type Director's Club typeface of the year. Ultimately, I couldn't come to terms with Brandon Grotesque's art deco leanings, and although the type eventually made its way back into the interior design of the book, I scrapped it for the cover.

I was stuck. I knew what I wanted the type to look like, but I couldn't find a face in my library that matched my vision. I'm not a purveyor of free fonts, so searching through the thousands of faces on fonts.com was not an option. For the skeptical among you, my font library is so large that I keep most of it locked up on a separate hard drive because it takes up so much memory and is quite a nuisance when designing. Anyway, at some point I looked to my studio moodboard for inspiration and found the answer I was looking for. The font I was imagining for the cover of Cumulus did exist, at least partially.

For the past year or so, I had been slowly sketching my way through a personal project I had affectionately called Teacher Type. The idea was to create a more usable typeface for K-12 math teachers. At the time of conception, we had been working on our single largest project to date, a mathematics workbook design for a company called Zearn. I had continuously run into problems with even the most robust mathematics-ready typefaces—among other problems, none of these faces employed the use of vertically stacked fractions (they had diagonally stacked fractions only), which are essential to the consistency of mathematics teaching set down by the Common Core Curriculum we were working with. In a state of desperation, I had set out to design my own font, and it is an effort that I continue to this day.

But I digress... the important part of this side story is this. I had, sitting on my desk, a pile of handdrawn fonts, and right on the top was the one I had been imagining for the cover of Cumulus. Oh, subconscious, how tricky you are.

Right away, I went about finalizing the typeface, a process that took several weeks. It is during speculative design moments like these that I'm thankful for clients like Eliot who present their projects early-on, allowing me the flexibility to pursue extensive lines of thought without impending deadlines.