This is the home for my digital portfolio. You’ll find samples of copyediting, developmental editing, interior book design, and a few other goodies.
My areas of specialization within my Book Publishing master’s program at Portland State University are Editing and Design. I’m also including samples of outside freelance work.
Keep checking back, as many more will be added as I continue to take classes and work at Ooligan Press.
Samples from books that aren’t yet published by Ooligan Press (but are in the process) are password-protected.
The final project for WR 571 Typography, Layout, and Production was to re-design From Knowledge to Power (K2P), published by Ooligan in 2021. We worked with the first three chapters.
The biggest challenge with designing this book was that it contains several illustrations, color plates, images, and boxes. (There are also tables, but we didn’t have access to those.) Working on this project was good practice in working with an image-heavy, footnote-laden text, and using grids in InDesign.
Here’s my cover. Again, not my design forte!
Fun fact. Some of you may know that I did my undergrad in Biochemistry at Portland State, and back in that life, not only did I take a handful of classes from K2P’s author, John Perona, I also did research in his lab for two years. While I was never good at bioinformatics research, I did then and always will have great respect for John, his teaching, and his passion for climate change education. I have fond memories of attending his climate talks at the Kennedy School back when I worked in his lab, and those talks eventually became this book. So, I feel an extra layer of connection to K2P.
For WR 571 Typography, Layout, and Production, we worked with a poetry collection called Echoes of Rainfall.
One of the biggest challenges with this project was to keep the poet’s intended structure. With a couple of longer lines for the trim size, there was a balance to strike between readable font sizes and not introducing new line breaks.
As of yet, I don’t have a music pairing for this portfolio project, but perhaps I could make a rain song playlist. I can commit to doing that before I graduate in June 2026.
For WR 571 Typography, Layout, and Production, we worked with the Project Gutenberg version of Frankenstein.
For this project, I designed both a cover and an interior. I’m no cover designer, but I’ll share mine anyway:
As for the interior, we were only tasked with designing the first five chapters of Frankenstein, but I got a bit obsessive and did the whole book.
Since I can’t seem to post anything without mentioning music, I must say that every time my professor mentioned the first five chapters of Frankenstein, I thought of The National’s album The First Two Pages of Frankenstein. Listen on Apple Music while perusing this lengthy interior.
One of the biggest design challenges was that large portions of the book, both entire chapters, and sections within chapters, are comprised of letters. I wanted them to stand out from the rest of the text, but also to be readable, especially considering their lengths.
This was my final project for WR 562 Book Design Software. We each had to design a chapbook. I decided to layout one of my personal essays. I chose this one, “Distant Lights,” because it had the most opportunities for design practice: sections that I could make into chapters in a chapbook, section breaks within the chapters, footnotes, and photos.
This essay features several mentions of the album Euphoria Morning by Chris Cornell (originally titled Euphoria Mourning), so feel free to listen to Euphoria Morning on Apple Music as you look through this portfolio project.
Because this is my original, unpublished writing that delves into deeply personal topics, I will share a photo of my cover design and selected photos of the interior, but won’t share the full text.
Cover:
Samples from the Interior:
Because I intended to print some copies of my chapbook, using InDesign’s “Print Booklet” feature, I needed a page count divisible by 4 (or divisible by 4 minus 1 if I wanted a blank last verso page), I added the extra page advertising future chapbooks.
And here is an iPhone photo of the printed version:
This, like the DE letter for the same manuscript, was part of my Book Editing class. Though I’ve edited many book-length projects, this portfolio piece is a small sample, starting about fifty pages into the text.
This project is from WR 561 Book Editing, and is a full-length DE letter to an author of a YA fantasy novel tiled RIVERS RUN RED.
Fun fact: As a class, we met with the author on Zoom, and s he shared her Spotify playlist for her book. So, in case you want to listen while perusing this DE letter, here you go:
Chrys Buckley 