Although the project itself took around a year and a half to complete, its story actually began in 2020, during my final year of high school, when I first started writing the poems that would eventually shape the collection. Each illustration was later created in direct response to its paired poem, making the relationship between image and text an essential part of the work. For that reason, the full experience cannot quite be translated onto a screen. The poems and illustrations are meant to be discovered together through the physical copies of the five books.

Choosing to self-publish introduced me to an entirely new side of design: printmaking, production, and the realities of the publishing pipeline, along with the financial and mental risks of turning a personal idea into a physical product. Even the unusual square format was intentional; I wanted the books to carry the familiarity of children’s books, but made for adults.

More than anything, this was the project that introduced me to the realities of taking design from the screen into the real world. It taught me that experimentation comes with risk, that an audience sometimes needs time to understand an unfamiliar concept, and that creating the work is a process with many layers.