Some people, for one reason or another, tend to do outstanding things. Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers is about the circumstances that allow a person to do these things. From the extended access to early computers that allowed Bill Gates to rise to prominence to the age differences between children in Canada's youth hockey leagues, Gladwell hones in on the seemingly random circumstances that allow a person to stand out.
For this cover, I focused on the idea of dice almost immediately. The circumstances described in Gladwell's anecdotes all relied on a degree of chance for things to end up how they did. With that idea in mind, I grabbed my dice and simply rolled them and spun them for a while, hoping to be struck by inspiration. At one point, a spinning die ended up in a pile of stationary dice, and I was struck by how it stood out from the crowd. Several sketches later, I moved into Autodesk 3DS Max 2011 to model, texture, light and render the dice. I then touched up the image in Photoshop and moved into Adobe InDesign to lay out the text and images on the cover.
