Melanomaly Experiential Book

Skin cancer disproportionately affects people of color, causing more fatalities due to ignorance and neglect. My intentions with this coffee table book are to engage, educate, and persuade people of color to screen themselves or pursue screening for skin cancer. In keeping with my message, I wanted to design moments of tactile discovery and reward into the book, using French and gate folds to hide copy for my reader to find.

To have an emotionally compelling narrative, two voices are at work in the book, one a scientific source and the other a personal narrative of a black woman being diagnosed with skin cancer. I told these two stories at the same time in proportionally similar fonts, experimenting with small typographic anomalies as an interpretation of barely perceptible skin anomalies. Feeling that images of skin cancer would disturb, scare and overshadow the nuanced messages I wanted to convey, I decided on abstracted visual interpretations.