Dust Jacket Redesign: This Is Water
This project was for an upper division book design class I took. I designed a dust jacket for David Foster Wallace's commencement speech This Is Water. For the project, I had to design a dust jacket that would appeal to a chosen audience, mine being mothers and daughters or young women in general. While this is a certainly well known commencement speech, I felt that this speech runs in more academic circles, and I thought it be interesting to reposition it as something that mothers and daughters could bond over, or serve as a piece of treasured advice for young women going out into the world. In addition, I wanted to design a dust jacket that looked less scholarly, and make it stand out or appeal to readers who may not be familiar with his work.
With those goals in mind, I sought out to design a dust jacket that had a touch of femininity and could allow the book to be an interesting coffee table piece. I used watercolor paint to create the graphic on the book and paired it with a handlettered font.
Tools Used: Watercolor paint, brush, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign
February 2016
