When I Grow Up
Self-published children's book

Role
Concept, illustration, two custom hand-lettered alphabets, and self-publishing, done entirely solo, from first pencil sketch through Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, to printed copy through Blurb.

The concept
An alphabet book built around future careers, each letter paired with a job a kid might dream about, from Astronaut to Zookeeper. Every spread carries its own illustration, hand-lettered word, and color treatment, all held together by one consistent visual system across the full alphabet.

Process
Every character started as a full pencil composition, proportions, pose, and framing worked out by hand before any color or type touched the page. Alongside the illustrations, two complete custom alphabets, lowercase and uppercase, were designed and hand-drawn as a matching type system, then used selectively across the book's 26 spreads. The full pipeline ran from pencil to scanned artwork, cleaned up in Photoshop, then vectorized and colored in Illustrator using a defined color palette, before being laid out for print in InDesign.

What I learned
This project was my first real practice holding a system together, illustration, lettering, and color all working as one consistent language across 26 pages. It's essentially the same instinct branding work asks for, just at a much smaller, more personal scale.