How to Face Your Fears
Accordion Book Design
Self-directed academic project
Tools: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator
December 2017
This one was personal. I made this book not only for people dealing with anxiety and insecurity, but also for myself. It came from a period in my life where I was still figuring out who I was, and putting those feelings into a design felt like the right way to process them.
The book has ten steps for building confidence and facing fear. Each step has a title, a brief description, and a sky that changes as you move through the pages.
That was the central idea: using weather to show the emotional journey. The first page drops you into a full thunderstorm. Dark sky, lightning everywhere, heavy clouds. That's what anxiety feels like at its worst. As you work through each step, the sky gradually opens up. Clouds thin out. Color comes back. Light starts breaking through. By the time you reach step ten, the sun is rising behind the clouds on a clear morning sky.
I illustrated the skies and sun in Illustrator and used the paintbrush tool in Photoshop to build the clouds. I wanted them to feel realistic and textured rather than flat, so they could carry the weight of the earlier pages. The lightning bolts were also drawn in Illustrator, one by one, to match the intensity of each stage.
Text color shifts throughout the book, too. Dark type on the bright, sunny pages, and light type on the dark, stormy pages. I had to keep adjusting as the backgrounds changed, so nothing got lost in the contrast.
The book ends with a smiling sun illustration. After ten pages of dramatic skies and heavy imagery, I wanted the last image to feel simple and a little playful. You've done the work. The storm is over. That smile is the payoff.
It's the kind of project where the design and the content are the same thing. You don't just read the journey. You watch it happen beneath the words.