Head of Design, Senior Designer
DK Publishing, Penguin Random House
DK Publishing, Penguin Random House
Art Direction • Design • Layout • Packaging
A four-book series for DK Publishing, created under license from Disney/Pixar, tied to the release of Inside Out 2. Each book is told in first person by one of the film's emotion characters: Anxiety, Embarrassment, Joy, and Sadness, giving readers ages 6–9 an engaging way to explore their own feelings through familiar, beloved characters. I designed all four books from cover to interior, developing a series design system that gave each emotion its own distinct visual world while keeping the books unmistakably connected.
Each cover needed to feel like it belonged to its character and not just feature them. The typography, background shapes, texture, and color palette were all tailored to the emotional personality of each book. Anxiety gets jagged, nervous energy. Joy gets soft, sunny clouds. Sadness gets a cool, amorphous form. Embarrassment hides behind a hoodie. The "hello, I'm" headline is a consistent entry point across four completely different visual worlds.
Each book's interior design system extended its cover personality all the way through: color palettes, background shapes, and layout language all tailored to the character. The result is four books that feel genuinely different to read, not just different on the outside.
Hello, I'm… published as a four-book series with DK. All four titles: Anxiety, Embarrassment, Joy, and Sadness are in print and available internationally. The series gave young readers a way into conversations about emotions through characters they already loved, with design that took those emotions seriously on every page. It was a pure pleasure to work on!