After several months of collaboration with the executive team at Starbucks, our team at SYPartners was asked to design the cover for Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s latest book “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for It’s Life without Losing It’s Soul”, which documents the company’s dramatic turnaround following his return as CEO in 2008.
The cover features a stark, powerful two-sided logo, evocative of the dual fight to restore the company’s financial health without sacrificing its core values. The book debuted as a #1 New York Times Bestseller.
We designed the endpapers to display the slew of Starbucks’ media coverage throughout their transformation: at the front, we show the negative headlines in the midst of Starbucks’ financial struggles, and in the back, headlines of praise following the company’s successful turnaround.
I hand-painted the logo with the purest of tools: fresh brewed Starbucks coffee and a wooden stir stick. The piece was scanned and high resolution and digitized to become the hero graphic on the cover. Later, we framed and gifted the original piece to Howard Schultz.
