I thought, this was a regular day in the life of a regular high school. I wanted to depict the banality of school life by using stock photos of lockers, hallways and students shuffling between classes, but I would have had to use images from Columbine itself or it wouldn’t have made sense. I also explored using the chaos captured on the classroom video feed, but I already knew that would have been too exploitative and painful for the final jacket.

In the end, I didn’t feel the need to frame the book in any point of view. What really needs to be said? The publisher had already set the tone for me. As far as the cover copy, there was no author’s name, no descriptive subtitle, just the word COLUMBINE. That said it all. So I used an exterior news photo of the high school. I made it as small as I could and cropped out any distracting elements, setting it low on the page. I extended the gray skies heavenward and set the title small and floating in Knockout white. The contrast was subtle, in hopes that the dramatically haunting sparseness would draw you in.

A welcome un-sensational treatment of a subject that has been sensationalized in the press.

An elegant, restrained design and nice use of the debossed type, sitting almost cloud-like above the school.