Fanny Hill Book Redesign — Hello I'm Jake

Publication designer and editor for John Cleland’s “Fanny Hill”

Duration:

4 Months

Problem:

More and more books are being banned today. My goal was not only to express that all books have an educational value but also to bring light to Fanny Hill: The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a book that was banned due to explicit descriptions of the journey that the main character, Fanny Hill, faces and deals with on a day-to-day basis.

My Role:

The book was written by John Cleland in 1749, but I took the writing one step further. I designed a new book cover, created five emotion-driven images, and chose the typeface that would be used throughout the book.

Solution:

When I first was thinking about this project I wanted to find examples of women being sexualized today as well as in history. For example, through social media, news media, magazines, sculptures, and paintings, but it was hard due to copyright licensing.

Soon after I had the idea of creating small sketches in the margins of the book as if it was Fanny’s journal and her sketches but it seemed to be too complicated due to the amount of time I had and how many pages were in the book.

Finally, I came to the idea that I used which was to create these black and white bold images with cursive overlayed to create a horrific feeling. The conceptualization of overlaying text came from the idea that she wears her writing and experiences on her skin and that the text sets her free from what she had kept inside for so long as the reader reads it. This is due to the book being a first-person narrative of Fanny’s story.

Research:

Before starting the book, I researched how books are printed and assembled, the various forms of covers and pages that you can choose from, various layout styles, what most books contain besides the main text, and different fonts and their readability as well as their relationships with other fonts.

I looked at other books for inspiration and I also thoroughly read Fanny Hill: The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and took notes so that I could really understand the message that I was trying to convey.

Challenges:

One of the biggest challenges during the project was concept development. I kept going back and forth between ideas and wasn’t sure how I could create strong imagery throughout the book effectively. At first, I thought it would require lots of imagery, but soon I realized that I only needed a few images that were strong and cohesive.

Additionally, I had trouble with transferring the text of the book onto InDesign. For some reason when I brought the text over for styling, it had random extra indents and extra hard returns, so I went page by page and manually had to fix all that.

Learnings:

Throughout the making of this book, I learned a lot. I learned about various books, font sizes, fonts, layouts, and uses. I was forced to think about how certain books are used and how that changes the size of the physical book and the contents within.

Besides the physical aspects of the book, I also learned more about the process of making a book. I learned about how books are assembled and printed and how the process through InDesign works.

I learned how to use character and paragraph styles within InDesign and how they can save hours of styling text. I also learned about using master pages and grids to my advantage and how it creates cohesiveness throughout the book.

Additionally, I gained personal knowledge. I had to be patient as well as push through my stress and anxieties in order to accomplish what I had. And not only that but now I have a new skill added to my repertoire of design.