These are Love(d) Letters

How might we create the sensation of reading an intimate letter within the format of a book while also communicating a range of different styles of writing from the same author?

This is a collaborative project called These Are Love(d) Letters, a work authored by my colleague and creative-critical scholar, Ames Hawkins. I created the graphic design and imagery for this book that investigates the rhetorical form of the love letter through visual and textual exploration. It was published by Wayne State University Press in September 2019. The cover and book design was named a winner at Association of University Presses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show 2020.

The process of designing These are Love(d) Letters was an intensive, iterative collaboration between myself and the author, Ames Hawkins. The master design theme of this book is that it feels as much like a letter as possible. There are five 4-chapter arcs in the book, each with its own illustration approach at the beginning of the chapter. Each of the 20 chapters is preceded by a pale blue interleave meant to mimic the blue of many of the envelopes. Each chapter opens with an image of the front of the envelope and closes with an image of the back of the envelope. Once inside the chapter, all of the imagery is pulled from the letter on that particular date. Any instance of the word “love” in that letter was pulled out and floats across the chapter from top to bottom. We developed different type styles for each of the “kinds” of writing in the book: narrative passages, theoretical analysis pieces, imagined fiction passages, and creative pieces.