a tale to tell

2024

The initial request was delightfully open-ended: “Something fairy tales!”. So I wanted to capture something universal to every child: the experience of discovering fairy tales, that moment of wonder when you first open an illustrated book full of rich, imaginative stories.

I began with a literal approach drawing inspiration from mid-century designers like Saul Bass: a simple color palette, sharp, angular forms, and high contrast illustrations. My earliest sketches featured a stylized Little Red Riding Hood making her way through the forest. It was visually compelling, maybe a little too scary, but ultimately too prescriptive. I realized I didn’t want to tell a fairy tale. I wanted to evoke all of them.

So the focus shifted to the reader herself: a child, alone in a quiet library, searching for her next adventure. But even that felt too grounded. Too still. Fairy tales are anything but static.

What if the books weren’t just on shelves? What if they were the space itself? That’s when the visual metaphor snapped into place.

The final design features an entrance into a surreal immersive hallway of towering books. At its center: the child, now skipping joyfully into the unknown, drawn toward the light emanating between the books.This design became less about fairy tales as content, and more about their invitation; an abstracted celebration of curiosity, imagination, and that beautifully strange in-between space where the real world gives way to story.