A reimagination of poe’s
“the tell tale heart”

SKILLS USED: TYPOGRAPHY, TYPESETTING, PROJECT MANAGEMENT, ATTENTION TO DETAIL,

SOFTWARE USED: ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR, MS WORD

When I decided to take an “Artist’s Books” class as part of my studio art degree, I wasn’t sure what to expect, or even it it would be a good idea, but it ended up being one of the best classes for my creative development. Books have been one of the most fundamental sources of creative expression for thousands of years across the globe. It was fun to look back into history for inspiration, push creative boundaries, and experiment with the question of “what is a book"? It may not seem like an interesting question on the surface, but when you dig deeper it opens a new way-of-thinking regarding aesthetics, history, materials, construction, and process that is different and in many ways more complex than other forms of art (drawing, photography, ceramics, etc) because its nature as a mixed media. It forced me to think in new ways that certainly enhanced my analytical and problem solving skills, attention to detail, focus on process, and breaking down a project into its individual parts, and create a tailor-made workflow that suits the project at-hand.

For this project we were supposed to visually reinterpret a popular written work. I decided to choose Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” as it has been favorite of mine since 5th grade when my art teacher gave a dramatic reading of the classic horror story celebrate Halloween. It is deliciously spooky. For the “meat” of the book I found a digital copy of the story and formatted the text to fit onto letter-sized pages. Then I found a suitable handwritten font and manipulated the text in Illustrator to visually depict the narrator’s descent into madness by making his handwriting slowly go from rational norms (i.e. uniform lines and letter spacing) to an unravelled mess (i.e. heavily slanted, uneven lines, erratic letter size and spacing). I carefully observed the text and tone to guide each manipulation I made to the text.

After I was satisfied with the look of the text itself, I printed it out, then used tea to stain each page to make them appear old, as if they were a confession that had been hidden under the floorboards for many years. Luckily my Dad is quite handy and helped me construct a wooden box that I imagined could be hidden in plain sight, disguised as a floorboard, as a sneaky nod to the diabolical story. I stained the wood dark brown and distressed the surfaces to visually age the box. The cherry on the top was that I found some very jagged old-looking nails on eBay. The perfect prop to secure the text within the wooden box, which must be removed to read Poe’s masterwork hidden inside.

I really enjoyed this project because it contained a number of different elements, both digital and physical that come together to present a well-known subject in a new creative, yet cohesive, way. The project demonstrates my ability to take an idea and carry it to execution by breaking the complex idea down into its individual parts, then determining and following a process tailor-made for the individual needs of the project in order to create a successful, one-of-a-kind, eye-catching final product.

(I often found that in my own art creation the process was more important to me than the outcome).