Radioactive Boy Scout is a non-fiction book about a teenager determined to create a homemade breeder nuclear reactor in his backyard. I felt that the original book cover gave off the feeling of a horror documentary, rather than an unbelievable story of misplaced ambition. For my redesign, I wanted to make a more abstract cover. Although the book describes events during the 1990s, the teenage David Hahn's inspiration to pursue this project was a copy of "The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments" from the 1960s. I used a font that recalls the look of 1960s Boy Scout memorabilia, and an image of the nuclear science merit-badge that Hahn wanted to earn. I gave the merit-badge a radium-green glow made of color-separation printing dots you might see in a 1960's 'Golden Book'.
This book cover illustrates a key scene/concept in the book "Flatland." In Flatland, 2D shapes navigate a flat world, where the move in 2 dimensions (a plane) and perceive their world in 1 dimension (a line). To the people of Flatland, the Sphere looks like the line illustrated above. The 2D shapes might perceive it as the edge of a flat circle. However, illustrated below the line is the true sphere as we know it: complex, made of infinite circles, with depth and volume beyond what any Flatlander can easily conceive of. I wanted these illustrations to show two shifts in perspective: the shift the main character (A. Square) must make in order to understand the Sphere, as well as the shift the reader must make in order to understand the world of Flatland.