Designer
Photographer
Editor

2026

Book Cover Design
Layout Design
System Design

When was the last time you picked up a book? Think back. Was it two months ago? Four? Has it been a full year? Maybe ten. You’re not the only one. The average American reads less than 12 books per year. In fact, 65% of adults in the United States haven’t read a single book in the past year at all. It’s shocking, if not downright depressing. So for my senior capstone project, I decided to try to solve that.

The goal of this project was to design eye-catching, creative, and systematic book covers for curated anthologies of classic stories, aiming to encourage and invigorate young adults and curious children to read more and different genres of books. The end result is a classy, yet approachable, series of books spanning 5 commonly read genres, with a connecting theme to open the doors to any number of other installments. The books are packaged in a decorative box made to live on your bookshelf. The books themselves are easily able to be removed, allowing you to pick one up at any time. The first few pages are a simple explanation of the book’s purpose and how easy it is to read, as well as a table of contents, allowing you to easily find your desired short story. Once you’re ready to put the book down for the day, you are able to use one of your 5 bookmarks, each corresponding to a book in the set, so that you can pick any of the five of them back up at any time. 

My hope for this book set is that it will open the doors to young adults to read more stories, with the thought that by picking up one story to read, you will be encouraged to continue reading more complicated books, eventually outgrowing this box set and the need to be “reintroduced” the reading at all.