When you walk into a bookstore, Steve Snider (Diploma ’65) has just a fraction of a second to catch your attention. As Vice President and Creative Director at St. Martin’s Press, Snider oversees the design and production of 700 book jackets a year. Each one, he says, is like a pick-up line in a bar. “If we get it right, we get to have that little conversation. It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going home together, but we’re sending the right signal to the right audience.”

Snider began his career in graphic design at a time when X-acto knives were the tools of the trade, and he was “just a schnooky guy doing my own thing.” He designed book jackets for Houghton Mifflin and Random House from a desk in his Brookline kitchen, knocking the T-square to the floor whenever he opened the refrigerator. He created covers for The Atlantic Monthly magazine and started the in-house design department at what is now the advertising agency Arnold Worldwide. After working for nearly a decade as Art Director at the Boston publisher Little, Brown and Co., Snider moved to St. Martin’s Press in 1996, splitting his time between his New York office and his family home (he and his wife, Marlene, have two grown daughters) in Wellesley.

While the computer has long since replaced X-acto knives and T-squares, Snider’s most recent award-winning jacket is decidedly old-fashioned. The Preservationist, written by David Maine, re-interprets the story of Noah, and its striking two-part jacket resembles a biblical engraving (above). With subtly colored images of the ark both surrounded by high water and by the animals disembarking, the jacket, Snider says, “tells its own story of the flood and after.” It won first prize in the 2005 Illustration Awards at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and was featured in 50 Books/50 Covers, an annual exhibit selected by the American Institute of Graphic Artists.

Not bad for a pick-up line.