Design – Chrys Buckley

Cekpa – Memoir Design – Galley

This project, a galley for Cekpa: A Memoir in Beaded Essays by Leah Altman, published in November 2025, was part of my work at Ooligan Press.

A galley is what is sent to people to blurb or review the book prior to publication. The design process for a galley is much more loose than it is for a final interior. Widows and orphans and runts are allowed, some front or back matter may not be included or finalized, and the fonts in the interior won’t have much at all to do with the eventual cover fonts, because a galley can be started and finished before a cover is finalized.

Here’s a representative sampling of my work on the Cekpa galley interior:

Pages from cepka galley interior revised Download

Here is the cover of Cekpa, in case you’re interested. It was designed by my Ooligan Press colleague Alex Devon, whose work you can see at mothinthemargins.wordpress.com! To be extra clear, this cover is NOT my work—I wish!—it’s here to add some visual flavor to the post, and as a chance to plug Alex’s work! Also, the book is really, really good and you should all read it!

From Knowledge to Power – Illustrated Nonfiction Design

The final project for WR 571 Typography, Layout, and Production was to re-design From Knowledge to Power (K2P), published by Ooligan Press 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.

Cover design isn’t my specialty—book interiors are!—but here’s my cover:

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.

With no further ado, here’s a sampling of the interior. I’m including the front matter as well as some representative pages of the interior that demonstrate my work with illustrations, boxed text, photographs, and footnotes.

Pages from Chrys K2P interior final Download

Echoes of Rainfall – Poetry Collection Interior Design

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.

CBuckley Echoes of Rainfall Download

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.

CBuckley Frankenstein Interior Download

Distant Lights Chapbook – Longform Personal Essay Design

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.