Writing on Writing, Blindness, Pop Culture, Science, Meaning, and Story
Frankenstein – Fiction Design
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.
Chrys Buckley was born with albinism, which means she has no pigment and she’s legally blind. Chrys has bachelor’s degrees in Arts & Letters, Micro/Molecular Biology, and Biochemistry. She endured approximately ¾ of medical school before breaking free to focus on writing and disability advocacy. She’s currently in the Book Publishing graduate program at Portland State University, pursuing concentrations in Book Editing and Book Design. Chrys is the manager of the Digital and Audio departments at Ooligan Press. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Sun, Shark Reef, and Aerial. She was a finalist (twice) in MTV’s “I’m from Rolling Stone” writing contest. She has won the R.L. Gilette Scholarship and the Sophie Kerr Gift in English Literature. Her debut collection Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays is forthcoming from Wandering Aengus Press. Chrys lives, works, walks, and writes in Portland.
View all posts by Chrys Buckley
Chrys Buckley 