When I heard back, the consensus was that the collages just weren’t working. They weren’t hitting the right tone, and I have to say, I wasn’t surprised. I had this nagging feeling while making the collages that, although cool, they didn’t feel quite right somehow. When I tried to make a collage that showed the many sides of Kane, it felt overly complex and chaotic, but if I did a simple composition with his portrait, it failed to give an adequate sense of the scope of his life. Neither was right for this film. Making a collage that encapsulated Kane proved challenging with so many angles: politics, media, exorbitant wealth, childhood trauma, and so on.

The brief then changed a bit. Instead of using a distortion of Welles’s image, including cutting it up for a collage, Eric encouraged me to focus on the packaging itself—how it would fold, what kind of die cuts there would be, whether there would be pockets or no pockets. I remember thinking at that time that I just had to do the film justice. It felt like there was no reason to create something brand-new when all the beauty was right there in the film—from the title cards to the dramatic angled shots. Simplicity and clarity seemed to be the right key words, and in this context they almost felt radical in a sense, given the complexity of the film.

At this point, I knew if I was going to use Welles’s portrait, I couldn’t obscure his face or distort his image drastically, but just showing his face alone felt too easy. Knowing this, I then focused on a die cut of something cropping Welles’s face, with a reveal of his portrait underneath. Then the question became: What shape should the die cut be? A rosebud? The title? Something more abstract? Once I did a few versions with the K, I started to like the dominance of the letter, and it felt like a monogram to me. The K shows up throughout the film as a sign of wealth, class, and ego, and this appealed to me for the cover because it didn’t feel forced.

After playing with the K on top of Welles’s face for a while, I forced myself to edit down even further, and the natural next step was to simply use the K from the credits’ famous title treatment. It just so happens that the way the discs folded out in the design created four separate panels, just the right number to spell KANE. I then held my breath and sent off my latest round of work to Eric. To my delight, he soon reported back that everyone was thrilled with the K cover.

A few weeks later, while still wrapping up some of the interior design elements for the release, Criterion tweeted a preview of the cover and tagged me. Flattering, right? Well, people sure had strong opinions on the design. While some loved it, others said they thought it was the worst cover they’d ever seen. Looking at it with some distance now, I have to say I kind of love the polarized reaction. When the film first debuted, it was considered controversial and drew dueling responses. This cover and box set being the topic of heated Twitter debate couldn’t be more perfect.