Book Covers: Before and After Four designers discuss their work on recent book covers: first a concept that didn't make the final cut, and then the cover that ended up on the book. Jason Booher on the design for J. G. Ballard's "Miracles of Life": I started off really wanting to use Ballard's face. He is charismatic and sometimes intense, but also very human. One thing I felt necessary was to capture the strangeness and the internal fantasy of human nature that was a part of Ballard's life and fiction. I really like this photo of him as an older man, and I tried to disrupt the normalcy of it in different ways. It took a while to get to what I think was the most successful design, by turning the head on its side and then extruding the photo between the two pulled halves of his head. The weirdness of this altered image hit just the right tone. The direction of the profile enhanced the visual rush from top to bottom.