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Book cover design for poetry collection. "Musings of a Fractured Mind" details the experiences and dichotomous psychological struggles the author faced while in the Vietnam War. The book cover details this fractured psychology with images from home and war, evaporating and delaminating under the pressure of his new, unrelenting surroundings. His experiences of love and pain are translated through the balance between his bright, soft, and dreamlike home life, and the crushing, brutal reality of war, disintegrating and interweaving themselves together.

Detail:

This design required several advanced techniques, including replicating printed-image burns. The resulting design mimics polaroid burns, with accents of dark orange and yellow distortions, melted edges, and realistic burn holes. Multilayered images with specific color correction created a the effect of real multilayered ink, paper, and coating when place under direct flame. 3 designs were created as preliminary options including fractured glass, paper tearing, and burns. The burning design was chosen for its more realistic characteristics and its connection to the author's life and experiences, an "incendiary" time. The process required iterative design and strong artistic communication between myself and the author, including 3 mid-design meetings to continue in a unified direction.

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