Tides & Teeth: A Reliquary of the Drowned Coast
A fictional museum catalog that blurs scholarship with folklore. I designed a clothbound-style publication and a set of selected interior spreads that treat “artifacts” from a haunted shoreline (teeth tallies, reliquary bottles, tide tables) as if they were sober museum records. The visual language starts classical and then unravels: scuffed paper, salt-stained edges, printer’s ghosting, and manic marginalia that sometimes obscures the text, hinting that the book may be annotated by the same forces the catalog describes.
I built a restrained typographic system, then distressed it with layered textures, abrasion, and penciled corrections, letting the page itself become evidence. There’s a deliberate catharsis in damaging my own work: scraping ink, scarring edges, and writing over careful typesetting to mirror the story’s entropy and to make the design feel honestly lived in.
Role: Concept, art direction, typography, layout, image compositing, texture design
Deliverables: Cover design and a curated set of interior spreads (essays, plates, tide tables)
Approach: Archival museum voice + unreliable annotations; hidden acrostics and circled tide values reinforce the narrative without explicit exposition; intentional wear-and-tear as emotional release
Tools: InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop (custom textures & overlays)
Deliverables: Cover design and a curated set of interior spreads (essays, plates, tide tables)
Approach: Archival museum voice + unreliable annotations; hidden acrostics and circled tide values reinforce the narrative without explicit exposition; intentional wear-and-tear as emotional release
Tools: InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop (custom textures & overlays)
Outcome: A believable artifact that reads like a catalog at first glance... and like a story you’re not supposed to finish once the handwriting starts answering back.
