Client: MADT 431

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Duration: 16 weeks

 

Objective: Redesign the classic book Howard's End, making its message relevant for a contemporary audience. Show how the approach of spirituality can soothe yourself and show how materialistic the world is today.

 

Background: The characters in Howards End struggle to reconcile worldly issues like wealth and materialism with philosophical issues. I am particularly interested in this issue because modern life is so revolved around the idea that materials and money make your life happy. I disagree to a point that items itself should be the sole purpose of a person’s emotion. Embracing Spirituality is embracing yourself which allows you to have peace in your mind. You are not letting the modern lifestyle bring your self-worth down because you don’t have the latest car model or not being friends with popular individuals in today’s society.

 

Research: My primary research consisted of personal interviews with my dad. His life experience and knowledge on seeking spirituality greatly informed my approach. I also collected information on spirituality from secondary sources including journal articles and blogs. Later, I discovered the 7 principles of spiritualism affiliated with the National Spiritualist Church in the UK and decided to structure my book around these principles.

 

Strategy: Starting the project, I selected my chapters and paired one of the principles, opposite of the chapter meaning. Once I felt I was done, I began working on Indesign for the purpose of creating and arranging how I wanted the content of my book to look. The cool green and blue colors I chose were intended to soothe the reader while reading the book. The next step was working on finalizing the content while working on the design of the jacket and the book itself. After the content was finalized, I started making the book and creating the design for the jacket.

 

Solution: Overall, I am very pleased with my end-product. While working on this project has inspired me to increase my spirituality thinking. I have notice how our life revolves around a phone or Laptop. I am under that boat as well, especially by being a graphic design major. I have realized that thinking outside the box or researching about that idea, back in those days was something you don’t really do. Which makes me assume that this was why it was banned because it opened the discussion of social classes.

 

Challenges: What I struggled with is formatting the book content to exactly how I was envisioning the design, pairing the right chapter and quote that makes sense to the readers and attaching the endpapers because it is very delicate paper and extremely easy to mess up. Another struggling aspect is always trying to embrace the spirituality views and attach that to my everyday life.. Although there were challenges, I still made two books, with a concept that is meaningful to myself, I am proud of.

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Programs: Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator