Illustration & Book Design
The Messenger’s Journey
Typography lesson with a little story telling mixed in.
Project & Details
The Messenger’s Unlikely Journey is a narrative book built from a single site: Bebe Woods, a conservation area in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
The assignment prompt was to develop a series of directions using three distinct modes:
- typography only
- image only
- typography + image integrated
I reframed that requirement as a story system — a fairytale structured around real navigational cues in the forest.
Research
Bebe Woods is in the center of an artist community, so the landscape is not empty — it’s an active environment full of small, unofficial, embedded works from local artists. Those discovered interventions became my primary research — found objects, found marks, found mysteries.
My concept:
if this forest already has characters, symbols, and mythologies embedded inside of it — then the most authentic way to give directions through this landscape is to tell a story that could only occur here.
Narrative Development
I wrote a fairytale about a Messenger tasked with crossing this “magical” woods to deliver a message. The arc of the Messenger’s path becomes the pathfinding tool. Readers follow the Messenger — and in doing so, follow the directions.
Visual Language
Every illustration in the book was drawn and painted by hand, then digitized.
The direction system criteria were solved through format decisions:
- Spreads with type only deliver moments of verbal instruction
- Spreads with image only deliver moments of pure environmental cue
- Spreads with type + image integrate both to reinforce the major directional turns
The result is a navigation logic disguised as a storybook.
Production
After writing and illustrating the full narrative arc:
- paintings were scanned
- pages were digitally typeset and structured into spreads
- the full book was formatted for paperback print production
The book becomes both an artifact and a method — not only telling a story, but using narrative as the directional system itself.
Graphic Design & Illustration
Plymouth, MA