I like to read the text of a book before designing. A lot of inspiration for visuals can be extrapolated from the literary themes within the text. For Do You Know, a lot of the stories mention the sky. Often the starry night sky that was hidden by the city lights before the hurricane. This seemed like a natural visual to pull out and use in some way. I decided to use it on the cover.

The sky symbolizes a number of things. It links old and new New Orleans. The sky was there before, during and after the hurricane. In a sense, it's the one piece of New Orleans which hasn't changed.

It's also an example of beauty in the face of calamity. Tens of thousands of people were dying of thirst and hunger. Yet above them for the first time was a chance to gaze up at a beautiful, naked night sky.

For me, the night sky carries the feeling of holding ones breath in a moment of crisis or surprise. It's so vast and deep that looking at it forever feels like being on the edge of a precipice. This seems fitting because now New Orleans itself is on a precipice. And in many ways the world is holding its breath in anticipation of how it will change.

This is the simple thought process for how the night sky came to be a major design component in our new hardback.