HACKED: Illustration & book jacket

(2021, spec)

The key art for Hacked originates from ideas found in my college sketchbooks’ margins. I used to spend hours using circuit board components to perfect the distribution of primary, secondary, and tertiary volumes in a composition. When I revisited this piece to publish it, I was very thankful for my habit of archiving and categorizing completed sketchbooks (going all the way back to high school). I was able to retrieve some of my original sketches and research notes within just a few minutes.

I first laid out the required typographic elements for the cover, the loosely typeset them and pulled the comp into Blender. 3D curves are very quick for prototyping because they can be modified with offsets and arrays (very tricky, or even impossible, in 2D vector apps). Then, I created a series of tiny fantastical motherboard components and used that as a set to “kitbash” from. I went through several iterations before landing on an acceptable design. My favorite part of this piece is the embossed circuit paths for the dustjacket. In Photoshop, extracting those paths and creating height data would be a chore—but Blender’s cryptomatte tools make object-contextual masking easy.