Brief: handmade original book cover design.

Client: Houghton Mifflin Publishing [A Shillington student brief]

Concept/Graphic Design/Layout/Illustration: Frankie Kuo

A book's cover should be the best first impression of the book, and I'll like mine to even foreshadow a bit of the story it covers. 

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" is a historical fiction by Jonathan Safran Foer, about a boy who lost his father in 911 before the book started. It is a story of an eight-year-old's silent inquiry, which compels him to go on a journey all around New York City in order to confront his biggest fear. 

For such a story, I visualizes its cover as something modest but delicately beautiful. I chose to use graphite as my medium because it represents the same unadorned and honest voice the author gives the boy as he tells the story. The alignment of the keys both figuratively and literally visualizes his journey, as he travels from door to door to find his answers.