Gardenias In Bloom

2024

Adobe InDesign

Adobe Photoshop

Creative Writing

*Images sourced from pexels.com

Gardenias in Bloom is a book written and designed by myself. Following Lynette through her struggles with substance abuse and her journey to find recovery, text and imagery through the book guide the reader through milestone moments in her life and her addiction.

Narrative Imagery

In a series of 12 images, I began forming the story for Gardenias In Bloom before writing a single word. Wanting to effectively combine image and text in my book, it was essential that these inital images conveyed feeling and emotion that could be understood as a story by themselves.

Typography

For the title and headings, Meursault supports the delicate nature of personal struggle and growth, and is reminiscent of floral imagery in the story.

Roboto is clear and legible choice for the body copy. For a short-form story like this one, the sans-serif is modern and friendly to dyslexic readers.

Title and Headings

Body Copy

Layout Experimentation

Utilizing a modular grid and a baseline grid, I began experimenting with interesting ways to lay out my text and pictures for my narrative.

I found a number of interesting ways to display pictures with body copy, but the pages weren’t harmonious and left a cluttered feeling as if the text and images were fighting for dominance on the page.

Final Layout Design

By aligning the text in a more unified way across pages, the design feels more cohesive than it did in the experimentation stage and the words flow freely from one page to another.

In writing the story in its entirety, I found it necessary to include additional imagery on top of the initial 12 images I selected at the start to enhance the reader’s connection to the narrative.

The choice to cut images out allowed for interesting text wraps and gave the pages more breathing room in comparison to using full rectangular photography for all of the images.

Cover Design

Gardenias In Bloom is a story of hope and determination, but it explores dark themes of struggle and addiction.

The cover design touches on hope and renewal with the floral imagery and waterdroplets while also expressing struggle and dispair depicting a young woman’s silhouette filled with smoke.

The hopelessness of being locked inside one’s self during active addiction juxtaposed with the promise of renewed life in blooming flowers is representative of the book’s theme and messaging, making this cover design appropriate for the content of the story.