This redesign of Jack Kerouac's On the Road experiments with typography and imagery-focused covers respectively. The goal is to express the aimlessness of the Lost Generation while appealing to a younger audience.
In On the Road, Sal Paradise and his friends haphazardly travel across the country in search of wild parties, drinking, and women. Both designs emphasize the travel aspect of the story as it displayed their aimless and stimulation-seeking disposition.
The image above shows several sketches as part of the preliminary process. The sketches explored a variety of ways that might express the book's themes while emphasizing either type or imagery.
In the type-dominant cover, the United States map was utilized to show the lost generation's reliance on constant relocation to distract themselves from the lack of substance that they felt in their daily lives without it. The title being partially hidden behind the map extends this message because it allowed the characters to ignore the parts of themselves that they didn't like.
In the same vain, the hitchhiker thumb is used in the image-dominant cover which can be seen in the process photos above.