Age 22: A Memoir
Creative Brief
A solution to remembering happiness in the middle of grief, light in the middle of darkness. Age 22 was a project that almost demanded to come out of me. It’s saturated with images, illustrations, and text from moments in my life, and proved to be a mighty cathartic release for one of the hardest years of my life. I wanted the book to have a somber yet beautiful touch—the design filled with light and heavy areas that worked hand in hand.
It is a six by nine inch little thing, sized for intimacy, and is hardbound with gray linen with 64 pages. Something that proved to be important to me during the design process was to leave room for the images to speak just as much as the text. You can see an example of this in the photograph above. One typeface was chosen for simplicity, and sixty-four pages were designed using a series of six different layouts. I started by digging through an archive of 35,000 photos that I have been collecting since I was twelve, and as I rummaged through past memories, the copy just sort of naturally flowed out of me. The illustrations were drawn on an iPad and vectorized in Adobe Illustrator. Each chapter is set to run chronologically through the past five years of my life, age eighteen to twenty-two.
The cover image was taken in January 2019, on the morning following Jack’s celebration of life. It was chosen for its dichotomy of sadness and wonder and hopefulness. I stood on the dock at Black Lake in Olympia, Washington, and watched as the right side of the lake was completely laden in a thick blanket of morning fog, while the left side was burning off with a golden sunrise. Loons came and went on the lake's surface, and it was one of those moments that was sucky and beautiful all at the same time, perfectly emulating the entire theme of the book. It was important the text was minimized, only present enough for the information, allowing the image to do the heavy lifting.
