Cover Design Process: Failing Better

Since we'll be getting into full drafts this weekend, and going through the process of working through multiple different versions of different concepts, I come back to thinking about process. Process is a bit troublesome for me--it takes me longer than I'd like to make the jump between concepting and drafting. Mainly, this is probably due to entirely too much perfectionism on my part. I've been trying to keep in mind the lecture that Chip Kidd gave at MICA last year. The organizational structure for it was the Samuel Beckett quote, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." [Kidd really only quotes "Fail. Try again. Fail better," but I gave you the original text because, well, it's the original text.]

Here's one of the funnier excerpts from the same talk that he gave (though this one is from an earlier event elsewhere):

There's also a video from Random House (featuring Chip Kidd, but also Peter Mendelsund, another big name in cover design, among others) discussing their processes for cover design. What's really interesting here to me are the examples of the various solutions for The Dinner, All That Is, and Salt Sugar Fat (none of which are Kidd's designs, just in case this post was getting too reverential or fangirly for you). 

In both cases, you can see that the various iterations relate to a similar concept (true also of Kidd's different versions for Augusten Burroughs's christmas stories above) but address it in both subtly different and more fundamentally different ways. Amy cautioned today about having an idea in your head that you might not be able to find the right imagery for, and against being too caught up in that idea that it limits you--this happens to me sometimes, so I find it helpful to see other designers' processes (keeping in mind that I probably can't just go to a museum on the off-chance and contract a photograph the way someone like Chip Kidd can...).

So, I guess I'm (still...always) curious about how other people manage process--what do you do? How do you generate ideas for different iterations? Are there examples of other designers' "process books" that help you think of techniques to try that allow for fundamentally different or subtly different solutions to the same design problem?

And, in case you're interested...

There's more from Kidd in his TED talk, which is pretty great if you haven't seen it, especially in his description of how he got to the graphic representation of the dinosaur for Jurassic Park, and in the first 35 minutes or so of a complete version of the "Fail Better" talk. The most fundamental things that he says in his TED talk that stay with me are about the responsibility of a book designer being three-fold--to the audience, the publisher, and the author--and that a book designer's job is to ask the question, "what does this story look like?".