WSJ – The Openness Elixir
This is a quick one that I recently wrapped up for the Wall Street Journal’s book review in their Weekend section. The article jumps on two new books that explore the value of decision making principally guided by the expert advice of others. A purely hypothetical example of this would be the chief of a large petroleum company consulting scientists and engineers to help determine how to best plug up a troublesome leak on an oil rig out in coastal waters. How much or how little should the direction and suggestion of these experts be weighed when determining a solution to this completely imaginary, entirely speculative problem? Enter two warring tomes: The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—and How to Know When Not to Trust Them by David H. Freedman.
As the titles may suggest, these two books approach a similar problem from opposite perspectives, so art director Marne Mayer and I needed to grab on to an image that played off of visual polarities while still avoiding the whole black vs. white / day vs. night / up vs.down / half empty vs. half full tropes which have been previously traversed for this sort of thing in the past. Hence, our final above and below.
In drawing a connection to my own role as the illustrator in this instance and one of the principal pictorial “experts” in that situation (and I’m taking a lot of excessive liberties by even using that word in quotations for myself), I was uncommonly convinced to near certainty that one of the two the below sketches would be a shoe-ins for the final when submitting my comps.
Expert am me.
——————————————————————————————————————————
Comments(3)
Ha! I designed the cover for Rational Optimist. The final cover lost the “Racing” stripes in exchange for a big-ass quote, as it goes. Still have not read the book nor do i think I ever will. One of those books that a synopsis will do.
Love your distillation of concepts here. All work nice, but the final one gets to the point without making you think much or look sideways or or or or…
I KNEW that cover looked familiar from somewhere, but couldn’t place it. That’s funny. I think I might actually prefer the cover as is with the stand alone, stoic ‘R.’ It says the title without having to say the title.
If memory serves, I’m also fairly certain that I used the stock image used on the WRONG cover for comps for an entirely different book which were (perhaps thankfully) killed long ago. That assignment had coincidences all over the place.
still have yet to do a title-less cover. I did one ages ago for a hindu book on saints. It was a lovely vintage image blown way up on the cover. French fold jacket and the whole bit, but I don’t really count that one…