The Drawer — On Rejection and Design

Every designer has a drawer — real or virtual — for work that was rejected. Mine is quite full. A book cover refused, a brand identity that won the pitch and then died in committee, a competition entered and not placed. If you added it all together, it would be a much larger body of work than the one that survived. Most of what I have made, I have made for no one.

In this essay I open the drawer. There is the cover I proposed for a special edition of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies — a grid of nine panels in blood red, forest green and dark blue, each holding a gold-line illustration of one object from a story inside. A reliquary for household things. The publisher ghosted it.

There is a poster for the Hahnenkamm downhill at Kitzbühel — a racer dissolving into speed, in cold alpine greens and dusty roses. Rejected. There is the Paris Olympics condom wrapper designed around the bilingual pun OUI CAN, which lost to another entry also featuring the word “Oui.”

The designer who takes each refusal as a referendum on their worth has mistaken the natural order of things for a personal attack. Everyone has a drawer. What varies is whether you can bear to keep filling it.

Read the full essay and see the rejected work on Substack →

See the book cover designs that did make it in my book cover portfolio →