Over the following two decades Carin designed hundreds of book jackets for all the major American publishing houses, including Simon & Schuster, Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Harper Collins, Doubleday and Hyperion, and dozens of album covers for record labels such as Warner Bros., Motown, Nonesuch, Interscope and EMI. The breadth of her work covers artists as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Susan Sontag, Dvorák and Madonna. Her book jacket for the 1986 reissue of James Joyce’s "Ulysses" has become an icon of postmodern design.

In recent years her image making has expanded to publication design and brand consulting for clients including AR and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.From 2003 to 2004 she was Creative Director at Time Inc. Custom Publishing,where she designed and consulted on publications for the New York Stock Exchange, Microsoft, Citigroup and Gallup. Her recent projects include design of the book "Last Letters Home: Voices of Americans from the Battlefields of Iraq" (Life Books, 2005) based on the HBO documentary.