Atmospheric Disturbances

by Rivka Galchen / Picador

A man's wife disappears. In her place a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her. A simulacrum. He loves her but he won't be fooled. He knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain that his real wife is alive and in hiding, he embarks on a idealistic journey to reclaim her. With the help of a man who believes himself to be a secret agent and is able to control the weather. He discovers that this man has developed a meteorological technique to verify that this woman is an impostor by using Doppler Radar technology. To prove once and for all that she's the "Dopplerganger" that he believes she is.

My original concept was to create a portrait of the woman out of Doppler Radar images. But it wasn't resonating with anyone. It was told that it was important to put across the idea of a duplicated person on the cover and to not make it too colorful. Back to the keyboard with the mechanical late for the printers.
The final design was born out of restrictions and deadlines. The character in the book is described as having blonde hair with bangs. Most of the woman images I found in stock were too posed. I photographed some of my co-workers faces. But the author liked the eyes on my original image. But everything else about her was incorrect. Her hair was the wrong color. So the only portion of her entire face that I could really use was just her eye. The author also liked this Doppler effect. WIth no time to see if I could retouch her dark hair into a blond, I instead cropped tight into the eye, placed it in the center of the circular rings (And NO, it wasn't die-cut. Limited budget. But I don't think it needed it). It was interesting but I still needed to convey the twin aspect so I duplicated it, flopped it, colored it and overlaid it to create tension between the two. So out of desperation with limitations and time came this solution.
I liked that I was able to keep it clean and work with basically two simple objects.

P.S. This is my very first design created and printed entirely from an Adobe InDesign mechanical. It's amazing. It looks exactly like Quark.

Doppler Effect:


Other Concepts: