It was all about trying to connect ideas related to his past and graphically trying to express the content of his stories in an abstract way. We had a long initial Onboarding meeting, concreting all the requirements for the project and trying to filter as much as possible to make the research phase easy-going.

After a long research of images, textures, colors and typographies, I’ve created a stylescape with all the essence of the project trying to show to the client the same point of view that I had and then mixing opinions for creating the unique project’s creative direction to follow.

We declined the idea of designing a so-used dark teenager aesthetic, and tried to experiment more with big headers and broken layouts, mixing what works with a pinch of experimentation.

In addition, like all the projects that I handle, I’ve used Notion for organizing, tracking and managing them, from the very early phase of the project until the end.

In the meantime, the sketching process started taking place into creating different layouts for the various pages and sections of the book. Trying different page sizes, comparing them with other similar pocketbooks size, and printing them for a better perspective on how they will really look on hands.

Simultaneously, the cover design process started too. From more simplistic ideas to more sophisticated ones as you can see in the images. The cover design process took about 3 weeks in total. I think it’s not about time but trying and trying different ideas, emptying your mind for a short and then, you will find the right one, for sure.

As a really heavy text project, I prepared the document for creating an easy workflow for adding text and automatically creating new pages as needed, with the InDesign flowing text feature. And it really helped me a lot. Nonetheless, I had to do so many tweaks by myself due to the special layout design of the book for getting the desired final result.

Once we got the final product, the last but not least important phase started: printing, correcting and paying attention to not passing any little detail that could ruin the work.

It’s one of the most tedious phases that concerns the whole project, and in this case, as both me and my client were so perfectionists with the little details, it took us longer than expected, but the effort was worth it.