Have the cover designs gotten significantly less "thriller-y" since then? Some might argue, yes. But Eliot's writing has also gotten significantly more sophisticated. What began as a project to write books about startup nerds disrupting corporate corruption (corperruption?) has grown into a body of work that pushes the limits of the techno-thriller genre in more ways that I can mention. Neon Fever Dream is no exception to this.

When Eliot first briefed me on the new novel, he was only halfway through writing it. Like the prudent author he is, though, he wanted to nail down the cover design early. (I've used this technique repeatedly to get authors excited about finishing their manuscript, and I think Eliot recognizes this in himself. Once a cover is designed, the book seems to be waiting for you to fill it.) As usual, Eliot's brief included the title, plot summary, some early back cover copy, and a moodboard of images Eliot thought might work for the cover. As I'm wont to do, I quickly discarded Eliot's moodboard images as potential covers. They were very good, but I already had other plans. I had been wanting to investigate a type-only cover design for a while, and the richly informative "Neon Fever Dream" seemed the appropriate title to try this treatment out.

My relationship with Eliot is such that I almost always present him with the riskiest designs first, and move in a conservative direction from there. The "risky" cover I had in mind featured a new favorite typeface of mine—Univia Pro—designed by the French typographer Olivier Gourvet in 2015. Univia's letterforms are distinctively contemporary, yet masterfully crafted, appropriately capturing a rounded personality within a more rigid framework. The bold face, in particular, interested me as an elegant typographic solution for the cover. It wasn't long before I'd found an appropriate letterspacing and baseline-baseline distance to fill the whole front cover. I decided to maintain the type through the author byline rather than to separate these elements, figuring I would differentiate elements a tasteful addition of color. From here, I knew that the type was dense enough to work with a layer mask, which is another treatment that I had been wanting to try, and so I went on the hunt for that perfect image.