On to the design itself. Jeff had suggested using the Leviathan and ship image by Liza Phoenix, which is a great painting that really fits the theme. Once Jeff came up with the title Mapping the Beast, I was pretty excited because I had recently bought this huge Taschen-published tome called Atlas Maior, which was initially published in 1665. In any case, it has amazing cartographic imagery, which I used extensively in the design. The difficult part was that the book itself is about 20" tall and weighs probably 30lbs, so it was kind of a nightmare to get specific pages onto my scanner to scan.
The title type is set in Poetica, which is a face designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe in 1992. Poetica is reminiscent of early Renaissance typography and the cool part of the typeface is that it has a zillion different sets of ligatures, alternate characters, swashes, ornaments, etc., which I used a bit on the cover.
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