Ninth Letter is the University’s award winning literary journal that is a collaboration between the Creative Writing Program and the Art + Design Program. I have done work for the Fall 2018 issue, 15.2 and the Spring 2020 issue, 17.1. For an issue of Ninth Letter, the Creative Writing department receives submissions and gives us the raw text files for us to design a way to typeset it all as a cohesive reading experience. While working with 8 other designers and an art director, our main objective was to synthesis the writings from the various authors and develop a book that best represents the themes and ideas present in the text. All work presented are my own creations alongside the final design.

Typesetting

To begin the bookmaking process, the team of designers presented ideas to layout the text, paying attention to the weight of the page, measure, footer, and margins. Then as a group we went through the multiple spreads to decide on what elements we felt worked the best.

Theme

After reading through of the writing that would go into the book, we tried to develop themes and imagery that fit the book as a whole along with a look that would be visually interesting.

Part Openers

The book is categorized in 5 different sections for the genres of writings, which means that it also needs 5 different spreads to be put in the book. The part openers for this book had a large number of iterations before the final spreads were chosen.

Cover

The cover’s main goal was to introduce the theme which was spending our quarantined life at home with nothing but jello. The jello is meant to represent the feeling of being contained and trapped which is something that we all felt during the second half of designed through book.

Final Product