Design Hero
Booklet
Junji Ito is a world-renowned horror comic artist. His stories are often short, self-contained, and have a way of sticking with you beyond the scope I’ve seen of other horror artists. When I was tasked with picking a design hero to emulate and design around, his works came to my mind instantly. As an avid reader of his works, and an appreciator of the horrifically beautiful, I threw myself into this project with an unmatched excitement.
Sketches
Months before I started this project, I had the idea for a long, shifting hallway that would draw the viewer in. On the walls I wanted portraits of his works that would become more twisted the further in the viewer went. These early sketches showed some of the ideas I had for the changing hallways and for the front and back covers which would be the doors leading in and out. These entrances to the ‘house’ would be the pieces that I made that emulated his style.
Digital Drafts
The most challenging part of this project wasn’t the ideation or the vision, as I had a strong concept from the start that I wanted to stick to. It was the execution of this vision that gave me trouble. My background in illustration gave me the ability to draw how I wanted these pages to look, but rendering them, especially the pages with the forced perspective, proved to be a challenge. I made many drafts and consulted with more experienced designers until it looked the way I envisioned. Another tricky aspect was aligning the pages that had cut-out portions, since they had to be perfect on both sides.
Final Draft
In my experience, its very rare that a project will turn out exactly the way you were envisioning. While there are some small details that I believe can be improved, this booklet is the closest I’ve ever achieved to that impossible standard in your head. By using all the tools at my disposal, I was able to make it come together and honor this artist that I so highly respect.
In order to make it come to life, I had to draw on both my art and design backgrounds. The front and back covers were digitally drawn in ProCreate in a style that imitates Ito’s. The same was done with the photo frames and the textured shading in the hallways. The hallways themselves were blocked out and rendered in Illustrator, the photos were edited and warped in Photoshop, and the full booklet was put together in InDesign. I had to be careful about importing files, preserving transparency, and keeping sizes consistent across the different programs, but the final product effectively utilized all of them.
