A sampling of covers Kevin has designed…
Jaguar
The finest books on the art & science of connection.
Jaguar began as a collaboration between connection phenomenologist and author Natureza Gabriel (Founder of Hearth Science, Convener of the Restorative Practices Alliance) and book designer Kevin Barrett Kane. At the time, Gabriel was writing Restorative Practices of Wellbeing, which would become the analog app for the autonomically-informed treatment atlas he had architected.
He had grown disillusioned with the business model of the publishers he had approached– due to the pittance of royalties they provide in their standard contracts, the tepid marketing efforts they undertake for most of their writers, and because he would lose design control over his manuscript the moment he signed with one of them. He found most of the cover design of comparable books insipid, most of the layouts amateur and uninspired, and the books themselves patently unimpressive as objects.
Convinced that he could do a better job producing his own book than most publishers, he was looking for a book designer with comparable chops. He encountered Kevin's portfolio website on a deep-dive into typography. And what he saw astonished him. Kevin had designed hundreds of books across a range of styles, the common denominator of which was a profound attention to detail, layout, and typography, while no two books looked alike. From Kevin's website Gabriel believed he was in Kansas City, running a book design firm called The Frontispiece.
He contacted Kevin by email and said, essentially– I want you to design my books and I'm not going to leave you alone until you agree to do it. At that point Kevin had, unbeknownst to Gabriel, moved to San Francisco and taken a job as the Chief Book Designer for Stanford University Press. By the time he agreed to collaborate with Gabriel, they were living 30 minutes apart.
Their first full-scale collaboration was Restorative Practices of Wellbeing, released in 2021. This was the book where thye figured out how to work together. Jenni Hart joined as editor, and Ash Tyrell as proofreader. Once the book was complete, they sold out of 400 paperback copies before offset printing 3,000– which was too many. This was the book where they learned the unit economics of the business, partly by messing them up.
Their next collaboration, Keywords: A Field Guide to the Missing Words (2023), corrected this excess. But because the book was so niche, pre-orders were modest, and they couldn't afford to print an offset run.
They went back to the drawing board on the business model. What if, Gabriel wondered, they serialized production of future books, and gave an audience the opportunity to read along with them as they produced the book? This inspiration lead to the launch of The Original Fire, on Substack, which has become a core part of Jaguar's strategy for building an audience. The Original Fire was where Gabriel wrote the essays that eventually became the seed for The Neurobiology of Connection (forthcoming 2024) and also where he published most of the essays that would become So, About that Death Cult you Joined? (2024).
As they progressed, they discovered that the quality of Ingram's print-on-demand books were good enough to be indistinguishable from trade paperbacks. They learned that they could design beautiful books optimized to print in black and white, and specifically design them for a print-on-demand model, which kept production costs down. In this manner, pioneered with So, About that Death Cult you Joined?, they have developed and designed The Archeology of Shadows (2025), and AuthorShip (2025).
At a certain point, colleagues at Hearth Science, including several notable mentors and advisors to our work, approached us about publishing some of their work. They liked the idea of being pro-actively involved in the design process, and the idea of a royalty model that incentivized author involvement in sales. We now have a number of titles in development with several of the world’s leading experts in connection and wellbeing, and are mentoring several writers and several mission-aligned writing projects.
Our books, like the Jaguar we are named after, are beautiful, sovereign, and deeply nature connected. We want to design the world’s most beautiful, artisanal, and interactive books about the art & science of connection. We hope you enjoy reading and interacting with them as much as we enjoy creating them.