Book Design

We all judge a book by its cover so let’s give them something to talk about and create a stunner of an image that practically jumps off the shelf (or the Amazon thumbnail screen). But don’t forget the inside! My jam is also designing the interiors of heavily formatted books that feature all those delicious design trappings like pull quotes, sidebars, infographics and the kitchen sink!

Let’s get a project on the books

Empty Heads, Full Bottles

Out in Spring 2024, this design needed a visual language that was emotional and gritty. Using a combination of public domain historical photos, stock images, hand-lettering and a restricted color profile, I was able to fashion compelling covers that ooooze the vibe of the author and publisher were after.

Publisher: The Reading List
Role: Designer
Genre: Memoir

It Starts with Self-Compassion

Celeste Headlee, an award-winning journalist offers a comprehensive examination of self-compassion and how it can improve your emotional well-being, as well as distinguish it from related notions like self-love or self-acceptance, all while centering her discussion around its three key components: mindfulness, a sense of connection to all of humanity, and kindness. Design notes were guided by fitting within the catalog of Celeste's previous Scribd titles, be inspirational, modern and rounded.

Publisher: Scribd (now Everand)
Role: Designer
Genre: Self-improvement

Mare’s Nest

Mare’s Nest troubles the meaning of a racehorse, in particular the broodmare and the foals she carries. Reaching from the photographic experiment of Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion” to Patti Smith’s album Horses, Mitchell touches upon history, dreams, Southern family stories, and queer adolescence in the early aughts.

Colloquially referring to a muddled situation or an illusory discovery, the term “mare’s nest” can also refer quite literally to the soft depression left by a horse lying in grass. And so the idea of a “mare’s nest,” in all of its linguistic potential, serves as the central focus for Holly Mitchell’s meditative debut.

Publisher: Sarabande Books
Role: Designer
Genre: Poetry

You Are Not Alone

Eleanor Powell: Born to Dance by Paula Broussard and Lisa Royère is an all-encompassing work following the American dance legend from her premature birth into a single-parent home, to her first Broadway performance at age fifteen, through her days as a blazing icon in the world of Hollywood, and finally, to her inspiring comeback. With access to rare documents, letters, and production files, as well as drawing on the authors' intimate personal relationships with Powell, this is a thoroughly researched, comprehensive, and fascinating look at an incredibly talented and unforgettable woman.

Publisher: University of Kentucky Press
Role: Designer

Leo and the Alien Human Basketball Association

Leo and the Alien is a story about five boys who play basketball together. When they become bored with the traditional two-basket game, they invent a new game by adding a third basket and another ball, requiring three teams to play. Little did they know that an alien from the planet Zenon would observe the clever take on the traditional game. The alien approaches the boys and invites them to come to his planet to show the other aliens there how the game is played. The aliens love the game and the Alien-Human Basketball League starts an unlikely friendship between the people on Earth and aliens on Zenon.

Role: Designer; Illustrations by Yunyi Dai

Thot

Thot is a ground-breaking, fast-paced, book-length essay that experiments with poetry, dialogue, and memoir. Themes that guided this design process and comps were marginalia, technology, doors + windows + buildings, loneliness, Greek Mythology. This particular book was a stunning read from start to finish and was a career goal to design for Sarabande. The marginalia cover option was a unicorn and approved with no edits! Sarabande Marketing and Publicity Director, Joanna Englert said, “Honestly, this is one of my all-time favs!!!”

Publisher: Sarabande Books
Role: Art Director + Designer
Genre: Essay; Literary Fiction

You Are Not Alone

As a military spouse myself, I understood this book’s assignment. After many days separated from my spouse, sometimes all I needed was someone to come to my house with coffee in hand to listen and cry with me. A lyrical devotional, Jen’s book invites the reader to a cup of coffee and connection. Originally published in 2016, I was brought on board to give this best selling book a modern facelift that wouldn’t age quickly and matches Jen’s modern and clean but warm brand aesthetic.

Publisher: Little Things Press
Role: Art Director + Designer
Genre: Amazon Best Seller in Military Family

They Made Movies

With Conversations with Classic Film Stars and Talking with Legendary Television Stars, journalists James Bawden and Ron Miller established themselves as our keys into the lives of Hollywood’s A-list. In this fourth collection of interviews, They Made the Movies: Conversations with Great Filmmakers, Bawden and Miller swing their focus backstage and pay tribute to the collaborative nature of motion pictures during the reign of the studio system between the 1930s and 1960s.

Publisher: University of Kentucky Press
Role: Designer

Commanding Professionalism

Commanding Professionalism: Simpson, Moore, and the Ninth US Army examines the achievements of these overlooked heroes. Focusing on Simpson and Moore's careers from 1940 through the end of World War II, author William Stuart Nance recounts the pair's working relationship. Together, they successfully maneuvered through the squabbling of the American and British forces and developed an army admired for its consistency of conduct and military prowess, capable of resisting the complex external and political machinations of the time.

Publisher: University of Kentucky Press
Role: Designer
Genre: Military History

HIElights of Hope: An Anthology of Stories From Families Who Have Been There

At a hefty 300 pages, this coffee table book resides in doctor offices and hospital waiting rooms world-wide. Meant to provide hope, information and community support to the individuals and families with diagnosed hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy. One Amazon reviewer said, “This book is wonderful! The quality is truly great - it is like having a beautiful coffee table book! The time and care that went into telling these stories is very apparent and I think having a book like this - allowing these family stories to be told in such an empathetic and meaningful way is so very valuable. This book should be in every single NICU and Obstetrician office - it’s such important work and is delivered in an incredibly purposeful way. Highly highly recommended!

Role: Art Director + Designer

Midpoint

Written for the 2.9 million men who are living with prostate cancer today--and for their loved ones, caregivers, and health care providers--Midpoint candidly explores the gritty, often embarrassing realities of prostate cancer and its impact on middle-aged male identity with clarity, compassion, and, ultimately, hope.

Publisher: Koehler Books
Role: Art Director + Designer
Genre: Non-fiction; Men’s health

Writefully Empowered

Writefully Empowered is a call for a writing workshop that has equity at the core of every choice made. It is not equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity, that will give our students the voice, tools, passion, and purpose to take on the challenges of today and tomorrow. Being empowered to use and hone their voice in the classroom should be seen as a fundamental right for students. The challenge and success here was to take a type-focused cover (it’s about writing after all!) and bring voice, passion, human, empowerment of young kids to the forefront.

Publisher: The Reading List
Role: Designer
Genre: Teaching Material

Unsettled Disruption

As a widespread crisis lurks as our ever-present reality, the question arises of how to develop new systems and societies that possess the resilience needed to thrive under uncertain conditions. Unsettled Disruption provides a systematic process to consider external factors, your industry’s chances of disruption, and the pillars that would help you build your strategy.

Publisher: Koehler Books
Role: Designer
Genre: Marketing + Entrepreneurship

The Tannery

The Tannery transports readers to the turbulent world of the post-Reconstruction South. Reflecting issues prominent in today's headlines, themes of Black voter suppression and intimidation, the violence and depravity of vigilante "justice," and the rise of Jim Crow drive the narrative to its dramatic and surprising conclusion.

Publisher: Koehler Books
Role: Designer
Genre: Black historical fiction

Stella and her Magic Wand

Y’all ever get the feel goods from a project? This totally got me. Written and self-published by Grandpa Phil and his adorable six-year-old granddaughter, Stella. My role was to take the illustrations by Abby Manock and create a book that was both modern, feminine, and a bit fantastical. When I first came into the project, all that existed was a word doc and jpegs and with my help, I conceptualized this into an actual book to pick up with your hands. From creating the cover wrap, helping guide the print size options to selecting the cadence of the type, this book was a pleasure to create. Cheers to women and girls in the publishing industry.

Publisher: Ease Communications
Role: Art Director + Designer
Genre: Children’s Fantasy Book

A Gathering of Men

A Gathering of Men is the account of the boys who board their aircraft for the first time and the men they become in the blink of an eye. The terrors they witness and the pressure to go up again and again and again brings them to the breaking point. It is a moving tale, based on a true story, about shattered dreams and enduring friendship, duty, and honor. For this cover, I scoured historical image archives for hours to find accurate photos from WWII. Lyrically written the design needed to speak to history and military buffs while also reaching the emotional side of War.

Publisher: Koehler Books
Role: Designer
Genre: Military Historical Fiction

Case Study

Writefully Empowered

A book for teachers, author Jacob Chastain’s Writefully Empowered is a workshop on how teachers can give voice to their students through empowered writing. My role as a designer was to create a cover that was marketed towards teachers of young adult students, had lots of movement, evoked hope and boldness and featured no images.

Read all about the design process →

War in the Villages

U.S. Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons lived in the Vietnamese villages, with the difficult and dangerous mission of defending the people and surrounding areas. CAPS also worked to improve living conditions by helping the people with projects, such as building schools, bridges, and irrigation systems for their fields. In War in the Villages, Ted Easterling examines how well the CAPs performed as a counterinsurgency method, how the Marines adjusted to life in the Vietnamese villages, and how they worked to accomplish their mission. The design challenge was to highlight and commemorate the effort, sacrifice but often overlooked mighty group of marines that worked with villages in Vietnam with reverence all while appealing to the traditional readers of military history.

Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Role: Designer
Genre: Military history

Malnourished

How do you begin to process your sister starving herself to death? For Cinthia Ritchie, writing about it was her method of coping, a means of searching for answers to long-unspoken questions. Malnourished dives deep into what we dare not speak—secrets, obsessions, deviations—demonstrating in gripping, lyrical prose how the damage done early in one’s life colors the taste of everything to come. And how the mouth filled with blood and stones might finally yield to gasps of clear air, discovering the texture of open terrain, a roadmap of back trails leading to a kind of recovery.

Publisher: Raised Voice Press
Role: Art Director + Designer
Genre: Memoir

It Always Rains on Wednesday

A strange unchartered world awaits Monte Scott, a young and inexperienced vocational rehabilitation counselor assigned to work at a residential school for the blind. From the first moments, his life is challenged and changed by confrontation with students, teachers and events in ways previously unimaginable. At times profound, often humorous and enlightening, It Always Rains on Wednesday is a story of relationships, set in the pre-computer age of 1969. Using Braille, pre-computer age textures and 1970’s color profiles, these design concepts brought praise from both the author and readers alike.

Publisher: Koehler Books
Role: Designer
Genre: Literary Fiction

Just a Pinch

This project was a labor of love to honor and celebrate the matriarch of my father’s family. From researching family photos, interviewing family historians, scouring my grandmother’s old recipe books to actually cooking and photographing her yummy dishes, I enjoyed working on this project from start to finish.

Publisher: Self
Role: Art Direction + Designer + Hand-letterer + Digital illustrator + Food Photographer + Author + Curator
Genre: Southern Cookbook

Leading the Whole Teacher

As Allyson Apsey illustrates in her groundbreaking new book, every teacher brings their whole self to school: their dreams, their personal challenges, their hopes and fears, and their desire to be valued, to be connected, and to learn and grow. As school leaders, we have a duty to create an environment that can support every part of a teacher, that can help them stay connected to their why, and that can fulfill their servant hearts.

The goal of each concept was to create an image in the self-help genre that was bold, welcoming and modern-ish sans serifs.

Publisher: The Reading List
Role: Designer
Genre: Self-help