It wasn’t until we were reviewing cover options with the VPs for this high-school level nonfiction title, and a colleague leaned over to me to whisper “put a bird on it,” that I realized what I had done. I had put a bird on it, and it was even blue.

This isn’t just any decorative bird though, this is one of Darwin’s finches—a tiny creature that helped form the theory of evolution. I was entranced by how something so small could be one of the genesis points of such a change in human thought. So this bird deserves to be on a book cover. The way the colors vibrate off each other adds the ‘shake’ and evokes the tension of the controversial theory at its inception.