How I Make Illustrations

Sketches for the logo of John Horgan's My Quantum Experiment

I recently posted the cover/logo I made for John Horgan’s new book My Quantum Experiment (available in its entirety on his website). Here, I am sharing the entire creative process, from the first email John sent me to the final mockup of the book, with all the sketches and ideas we’ve thrown around in between.

I love hearing demos of songs whose album versions I’ve listened to so many times it feels they never had a draft stage; or seeing a stand-up comedian develop a bit from a premise that barely got a chuckle on its first try; or watching Paul McCartney compose Get Back from scratch in that Peter Jackson documentary — there’s something both magical and down-to-earth about the way ideas emerge out of nothing, oftentimes incoherent at first, and then grow into something that induces a feeling or makes sense or both.

John’s first suggestion was to “draw an old guy holding up and staring at a wave function, Ψ, sort of like Hamlet holding up the skull of Yorick.”

I thought the guy could be made to resemble a Hinduist statue—”except, he's more confused-looking than blissed, and slumped instead of having ideal posture”—and the Ψ could be made to look like Shiva's trident. Maybe his other hand could make the “eh i don't know” gesture.

John rejected the Hindu/Shiva reference as “a bit too culture-specific” and instead shared a symbol for the quantum notion of “participatory universe, which says that our consciousness is somehow necessary for existence, and that when we contemplate the universe, we are really contemplating ourselves. The U is for universe. I had in mind something that makes the same point, that when we contemplate quantum mechanics, we are contemplating ourselves.”

He also suggested “another simpler possibility: Have the book title superimposed on a sine wave. So imagine this with a sine wave undulating behind it:”

At this step, I started to sketch out different symbols. “It’s nothing very promising,“ I told John in an email, “just a record of the first brainstorming session.“

The first one was a mirror, to express the idea “that when we contemplate the universe, we are really contemplating ourselves.“ I already had one laying around, though its message seemed to be closer to “when we contemplate ourselves, we are really contemplating the universe.”

Then, the old man getting befuddled, and the Ψ as a trident.

And something about the participatory universe, with an added mystical bent.

After a break, I set out to experiment with the symbol of the wave function, Ψ. It’s pretty iconic, there must have been something I could do with it.

Like, put an eye on it.

And add some mushrooms.