Book Designs & holiday card
826NYC is a writing center based in Brooklyn, NY. I first volunteered in a 1st-3rd grade writing classroom once a week, and then I started getting involved in transcription, book design, and other illustration needs for them.
Below are a few of the books I’ve designed for them—including work on typography, cover and divider illustrations, and page layouts. I also designed their 2023 holiday card, which went out to 826 students and their families.
The 826NYC Review, Issue No. 14
The Annual Review is a book that contains a huge range of writing (by genre, by age of the author, by length and nature of each piece, etc). It was a challenge to find a cover that could encapsulate all that this book contained.
I actually read through the whole book to get inspiration for the cover, and I was struck that each student had presumably started with just a pencil and paper, but we ended up with a rich variety of content. That inspired this pencil-themed cover: from this simple tool springs everything else.
The chapter divider pages presented a similar problem: though thematically related, each chapter still contained a huge variety of work. Instead of trying to encapsulate everything in one image like I did with the cover, I pulled many pieces of imagery from the students’ writing. The “highlighted” icons correspond to pieces you can find in that chapter.
This actually mirrors the naming conventions for each chapter (which I did not come up with)—the chapter titles are pull quotes from student writing!
Below are several gut spreads that show the variety of work included in this book, each of which required special attention to layout and/or typography.
Leave It Unsolved
Leave it Unsolved is a poetry book by NYC middle schoolers. The unique challenge with this book was ensuring that my designs didn’t come off too juvenile for this older group of students.
I also focused on typography in the poetry, since formatting can be especially crucial in poetry. I proofread the entire book several times to make sure everything looked true to the original student writing.
Below are several gut spreads to showcase my layout and typography work.
I have chosen to black out the authors’ names where I’ve included the entire poems, since these pieces are about relatively sensitive topics and the audience here on my online portfolio may be quite different than the original audience for these poems.
2023 Holiday Card
I illustrated this wintry subway scene and did some simple layout and typography for 826NYC’s 2023 Holiday Card, which was sent out to 826NYC students and their families.
It was fun to think of a way to represent young writers in NYC in the winter!
