Monday, March 12, 2012

Final book cover design - #Turing's poison #apple

The final book cover of the Universal Machine is in. The new cover design slightly reworks the previous one which was voted the best by a majority of my friends who saw four alternatives. At the top is a passport photo of Alan Turing, signifying that the reader will go on a journey with him through the history and future of computing. The new design replaces the green apple with a red one, which is a reference to the poison apple with which Alan Turing committed suicide. His means of suicide was itself a reference to the poison apple in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was Turing's favorite movie.
The apple with a bite out is of course a reference to the Apple logo, since Apple, Woz and Steve Jobs feature in the book occupying almost two chapters. In an interview Steve Jobs said the logo "isn't [a reference to Turing], but I wish it were!" The serif font of the book's title is also a reference to the clean simple sans serif font that Apple use. The background field of the cover, which is quite faint, is a circuit diagram of a computer chip.

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