Throughout my career I've had the opportunity to create the designs for book covers, inside spreads, ebooks and white papers. Here is a sampling of some of my favorite book projects.
Date
My role
Visual Designer
Throughout my career I've had the opportunity to create the designs for book covers, inside spreads, ebooks and white papers. Here is a sampling of some of my favorite book projects.
The Hummingfish Foundation, founded to promote sustainable community-based tourism, was commissioned to produce a book for the International Conference on Youth, Identity and Nationbuilding in East Timor. My task was to allow the incredible photography and the voices of those interviewed to be at the forefront in telling the story.
In addition to designing the cover artwork for "Patchwork Someone," a personal memoir penned by a good friend of mine, I created the interior layout for publication as a hardbound book, as well as a Kindle EPUB version. This book was first published in October 2020, and is a fascinating read. For the cover design, I made a list of specific objects throughout the book that have special meaning to the narrative. I turned these into icons and narrowed down the number to include only the most important objects, and used them as an integral part of the cover design. I enjoy creating beautifully balanced designs that reflect the tone of a piece, which is what I was striving for here, but I also love infusing my designs with hidden meaning, in this case for readers to discover the objects on the cover as they journey through this compelling memoir.
While teaching English in China, I befriended M. Dujon Johnson, an American who was pursuing his Ph.D. in East Asian studies. I jumped at the opportunity to design a cover for his book, “Race and Racism in the Chinas: Chinese Racial Attitudes Toward Africans and African-Americans,” which ended up becoming a 2008 NAACP image award nominee. He went on to become the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in China. One of my hobbies while living in China was scouring local markets for old communist propaganda memorabilia, and I happened upon one that was the perfect image on which to base this book cover design. I used the stylistic inspiration and colors from the poster to build out the design for the cover, while giving space for the image to have an impact.
