The goal of this project was to create an accordion fold to document using expressive typography on one side and illustrations on the other in order to convey a chosen haiku poem, selected from a provided list. I had created two submission options for this project, one based on the poem “Suicide’s Note” by Langston Hughes and the other on the poem “Everything I Touch” by Kobayashi Issa. The first submission is for Langston Hughes’s poem which reads as follows: “The calm, cool face of the river, asked me for a kiss”. For the illustrated side of the accordion fold, I used Procreate to draw the visuals and the remaining typographic side was made using Adobe InDesign. The organic and smooth lines in the illustration were used to enforce the poem’s strong imagery of rivers and overall tone.

The second submission I created was for the poem “Everything I Touch” by Kobayashi Issa, a Japanese poem that was translated to English for the purposes of this assignment. It reads as follows: “Everything I touch with tenderness, alas, pricks like a bramble”. Given that once side of our accordion fold needed to be made solely of type, I decided to create the brambles mentioned in the poem using the same letter forms that make up the sentence. The result was an interesting visual tying the written text with the imagery it conveys to readers. The drawing portion was made using Procreate and was then imported into InDesign to be positioned and finalized.