Letters To A Young Poet is a collection of letters by Rainer Maria Rilke about life as a creative person and how creative ideas are developed. This experimental publication displays that narrative by using color as a metaphor for creativity. The publication is composed of formal relationships between hand-made collages of black-and-white photocopied magazine snippets and colorful acrylic paintings. As the publication continues, the amount of color used in each layout increases, symbolizing how creative ideas reveal themselves from beneath the surface and spread into all parts of life.
The process of designing and curating this publication was very personal for me. When I approach a new creative project, I always think about the intersections that can be formed between design vs. art and hand-made vs. digital, and this publication was my opportunity to explore that in its rawest form.
The process included lots of back-and-forth between using my hands to make things physically, scanning, composing the collages into digital layouts, realizing that I needed more collages, returning to my hand-made techniques, scanning the new collages, and so on. It was a very meditative exercise in abstract expressionism, and in doing so, I learned a lot about my own creative process, just as the author Rilke preached in his letters.
