"ONE DAY, I WILL RETURN BY YOUR SIDE"
A design that IS a book cover. Wow, I printed and published an entire book! An autobiography! It's a one-copy edition - you will NEVER see the full version, and it will be gone with time even after I die.
One of my final projects as a part of my Associate's Degree was to publish an entire book. From front to back, cover to cover, all the words had to be original and all the designs had to be crafted by the hands of the author (and then the type had to be set, proofed for errors, sent to print, and so on and so forth). It was a great learning experience, using all my accumulated knowledge over the past year and a half to bring a whole book into the world, from nothing! And so, in spirit of the subject matter, I wanted to push the Adobe products I was using to their breaking point.
Many of the images included are scattered fragments of my past and memories from what few mementos I have left and have decided to keep around. Just due to how I've grown and my personal worldviews, I'm not one to clutch onto the physical representations of my memories via memorabilia. Some images are from gifts and notes given to me by my friends and peers, others are magazine pages torn out from their context and given to me by such labels as Disposable America, and even more are original designs crafted on top of oddities I'm sure anyone else would have thrown away by this point if it had not somehow stowed away in U-Haul boxes taken across states. I figured all of them are important to who I am, somehow. So many have been scanned and reflected into the book, though few are left unscathed. Just due to the legal suggestion from my professor to change the material using some artistic liberty so as to avoid "potential legal issues when sent to the printer," I took the opportunity to chop-and-screw many of these trinkets as a kind of reflection of how I view my old memories through the lens of pain in my mind. I don't mean it in a "man... aren't I so cool and messed up" way, more just a way to show that I really do feel distant, scattered, and sad when I remember stuff from too long ago.
I'm certain my professor didn't intend for students to force open a slew of old wounds when creating this project. The only conditions for the book were the technical specs and that it had to be an autobiography. For many college-age kids, that's certainly no big deal; how exciting could one's life really be by age twenty? Well, mine. My life has previously been exciting in all the wrong ways. So, for my book, I simply reflected on where I've lived throughout the years, and how the culture has shaped me into this person I am. It was a surprising opportunity for me to reflect on these moments I've ignored, make amends from them, and even more shockingly (at the time), move on from them. I found that,as much as I now appreciate Idaho, I missed and longed to be back in Canada again. Now that I've moved away, I don't think I'll be making another book like this again.
P.S. - The title is an apt quote from Disco Elysium... but it's actually slightly incorrect! Oh well.
[2023]