Writing on Writing, Blindness, Pop Culture, Science, Meaning, and Story
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.
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Because this is my original, unpublished writing that delves into deeply personal topics, I will share a photo of my cover design and selected photos of the interior, but won’t share the full text.
UPDATE: This essay is part of my debut collection, INVISIBLE VIOLETS: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays, available on March 13, 2026.
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 this extra page advertising future chapbooks.
And here is an iPhone photo of the printed version:
This, like the developmental editing letter for the same manuscript, RIVERS RUN RED, was part of my Book Editing class. This portfolio piece is a short 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.
Here is the full letter:
Chrys Buckley 