Cover artwork by Kevin Clarke, “Bug Under Glass”; photographed by Becky Hale

Photo by Robert Clark. I have a tiny replica Homo naledi skull—the ancient human ancestors who are the subject of this book— on my bookcase at home, created by the author.

Cover art by Alison Bruns

This charming memoir from the former head of SETI deserved a better cover than the one it got (which I also designed). This was my fave as well as the editor’s, so let’s pretend this is what went to print. The image is an old deep-field view from NASA.

Illustration of a marine iguana from the Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Cover illustrations by Briony Morrow-Cribbs. Glow in the dark spot gloss on the title as a special surprise.

This series of travel memoirs by storied authors was an early project for me at National Geographic.

This is another cover that lives in my “woulda-coulda-shoulda” folder. The image was pulled from the now-defunct stock agency a few days after it was approved, so we had to move on to something else.

Cover art by Julius T. Csotonyi, based upon scans of a nearly complete mummified hadrosaur that was the subject of the book. If you ever need someone to draw you a very accurate dinosaur, I highly recommend Julius.

Our Amazon Sales rep called this cover “obscene” and “disgusting” when we showed it to the team at our sales conference, so I knew I must be on to something.

Image by Visko Hatfield. This was a candid outtake from the shoot, but it felt like the most relevant option at the time.

6-color printing with two hits of opaque white ink on a silver foil sheet. Illustrations by Piñata at You Work For Them.

Magpie painting by the incredible Basil Ede.

Those are Darwin’s actual blood sucking finches that he collected on said voyage in the Galapagos! They were photographed by Frans Lanting.

Spot gloss on that O, naturally.

I bought that thermometer on ebay for $9.99, and digitally altered the readout to only have 6 degrees. It was German, and came in a little red leather case. I still have it. Photo by Mark Thiessen.

Cover photo by R. Gino Santa Maria, altered by me to look more scary.

Mosaic photo by Andrea Thompson; mosque image by Roberto Chicano.

Cover photo of Nefertiti bust by Jürgen Liepe

Cover art by Eric Nyquist

Perhaps one of the most widely-known series I’ve worked on, the Blue Zones series continues today with the original branding style I created back in the early 2000s.

I can’t remember if this is a Hubble or a James Webb image of a nebula that I altered into a ?, which probably makes me unfit to have even worked on the project.

I printed out several pictures of the Earth from space, crumpled them up into balls, and photographed them on my living room floor before I finally took the priceless shot you see here.

Cover art by the always hilarious Giulia Ghigini.

Back at it with more cover art from Giulia Ghigini!

A humorous, witty exploration of the process of grieving, this cover features a casserole baked by the editor (who is also holding it), and a cover photo by Sarah Jun.

Image of Jacques Cousteau checking his breathing apparatus before a dive from UPI.

Art by Eiko Ojala

Image of Three Ships in a Gale by Willem van de Velde.

Artwork by Andreas Lie, using images shot by the authors, Jim and Jamie Dutcher.

Pith helmet by Siede Preis

Bob Ballard has done so much more than just finding the wreck of the Titanic that we really wanted to evoke the entirety of the ocean deep on this cover, rather than focusing on the find that made him the most famous living underwater explorer.

Another from my woulda-coulda-shoulda files, this idea made it very far down the pike—an approved cover and interior sample pages, along with a partial manuscript—before it was scrapped. The stories in it were the exact kind of thing I would want out of a cocktail book, though some of the drink recipes had very hard to find ingredients. I used some vintage, classic “National Geographic” elements in this design, including the old masthead treatment.

Box jellyfish by Gary Bell.

Lewis and Clark Expedition (oil on canvas), by Thomas Mickell Burnham, (1818-66)/David David Gallery, Philadelphia, PA,