I was able to design Grace Ingles’s senior portfolio project for her professional writing degree. I loved being able to do illustrations this semester, and had fun laying out the interior designs for this book in particular. I was able to play off of the design and color scheme of The Girl Who Drank The Moon, and use a similar typography as the Lunar Chronicles, which I really enjoyed.
Book Design for “Efflorescence”
I had the opportunity to design the cover and interiors for another professional writing student at my alma mater. Since designing your own book isn’t a requirement for this class, students often enlist the help of their art major friends. In my case, I offer to do the full cover and interiors at a discounted price for PCC students.
Book Design for “After the Fire”
At my alma mater, seniors studying Professional Writing must compile their best writing samples—including fiction, poetry, advertisements, and essays—and publish them in a physical portfolio at the end of the semester. Most PW majors enlist friends or hire out the design work so they can better focus on editing their pieces, and I’ve enjoyed doing a number of portfolios for the last few years. This was Emily Thompson’s final portfolio design. She wanted an artistic flair to the cover similar to my PCC Survival Guide book. Many of her portfolio pieces demonstrated themes of hope and revival from difficult or trying times in life, and she wanted to correlate that theme with the fireweed blossoms that grow up after devastating forest fires. For this reason, I decided to play with color clashing with monochromatic greys. I deliberately chose to make the edges of the book charred and ashy looking, but as the blossoms come into the foreground, I wanted them to become bright and colorful.
Life Update: Post Graduation
The last year and a half has been a constant churning of life’s ocean waves when set on a giant spin cycle. Between COVID and finishing up my master’s degree, I barely have an internal clock or a solid sense of time (as if I had one in the first place). But now things are finally getting back to normal (well, as normal as post-graduation adult life can get), and therefore it’s probably worth giving a life update.
Cover Design for “The Kingdom Heir”
I was able to design this cover for Lana Howell’s debut novel, The Kingdom Heir, published by Xulon Press.
Cover and Layout Design for “A Writer’s Wilderness”
Ever want to read a western…but with dragons? Kylee Kosoff just graduated with her degree in professional writing and published an anthology of her work (and yes, there be dragons in the west).
Blood Drive Highlight Video (Pensacola Christian College)
While working in the video advertising department at PCC, I got a chance to create the highlight promotional video for this semester’s blood drive. This year’s would be extra tricky, since we had to be extra conscious of social distancing and other COVID mandates, and that we not show anything that would contradict the policies the college had set in place. This year I wanted to go against the norm and make the blood drive look more “fun” than “inspirational.” In the past, the blood drive videos often had slow, thoughtful music with careful camera angles. Instead, I wanted to capitalize on any happiness I could scrounge up during this depressing COVID-y year, so I picked a happy song and focused on as much smiling and joy as possible. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OojvpTvHKXw&w=560&h=315]
End-Semester Book Cover Redesigns
This is the second half of my semester redesigns. For our Conceptual Communications class we had to create weekly artwork based on a prompt. I decided to redesign well-known book covers based on each. Below are each of the three covers with their original photo references that I used to combine into a single image. One of my goals for these projects is to create a professional book cover using entirely free resources from Pixabay, Dafont, and other online sites (with the obvious exception of Adobe, which sadly isn’t free). Below you can see each photo I used in each cover, and you can find every resource free online.
Mockup Cover Designs for RED Trilogy
Eighteen-year-old River Ardis lives in a future where terrorists infiltrate the country as teenagers. She tries her best to keep her head down and away from the unrest until she meets a distraught girl from the 1990s. But little do either of them know, the oppressive government has been hunting the time traveler for years—and anyone associated with her. I began writing my time travel dystopian trilogy when I was fourteen, and it’s since undergone extensive edits for the past ten years. While I intend to pursue a traditional publishing house, which would be responsible for cover designs, I wanted to design my own cover and layout for a class project.
Christmas Lights 2020 (Pensacola Christian College)
Due to the pandemic, PCC couldn’t have their annual Christmas Lights celebration, so our video team was tasked to create a series of music videos similar to the Mary Did You Know music video I helped with several years ago. I was able to help on the set of a number of these music videos as a PA, keeping track of each scene, helping set up and tear down equipment, prepping the set, and creating lights and effects during filming. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-9_ieykEWU&w=560&h=315]