Poetry Book Design

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Link
Designing a poetry journal

Client

The University of Mississippi creative writing students

Objective

For this project, we were asked to design the first issue of a new literary journal. Each issue of this journal curates a collection of poems written in a specific type of location. For this particular issue, a group of poets from the University of Mississippi provided us with poems that had a central theme of connection.

Solution

I immediately thought of the title “Link,” which emphasizes the idea of connection. I wanted to work with the image of chains, as it is a fitting metaphor for thousands of human connections. A chain runs throughout the entire journal, and is depicted in ways that reflect the type of connection described in the poem. Additionally, all of the poems feature callouts of what I found to be the most compelling parts. The emotionally-charged callouts are emphasized in an orange-yellow color to distinguish them from the rest of the text. The predominately-white spreads are contrasted with close-up, textural shots of chains. Along with designing the piece, all of the photography was taken by myself.

An online flip-book version of the original can be viewed at http://issuu.com/hsarmstrong/docs/link