INSTITUTION Tyler School of Art and Architecture
INSTRUCTOR Scott Laserow
FALL 2022
The Complete Survival Guide to Urban Legends is an originally written and designed hybrid book project, which culminates and details the haunting folklore behind the creatures that go bump in the night.
For this project, I was tasked with conceptualizing, designing, and building a book that functioned dually in augmented reality. I’ve always had an interest in all things occult, and I thought it might be exciting to explore some of those pseudo-scientific themes in a project with so much interactive potential. I narrowed my concept to an encyclopedia of urban legends, creating an illustrative “survival handbook” that could be referred to in an encounter with these supposed phenomena.
Due to the nature of oral tradition, my sources of information were very scattered and varying in quality, so I set out to independently write the contents of my book. Early on in the research process, my approach to the subject matter gained some maturity. I made conscious efforts to avoid trivializing longstanding cultural beliefs, so I decided to treat each legend as if it was very real, spinning tales of caution and interweaving elements of horror into the narrative.
With so many layers of texture, photography, illustration, and physical interactivity, the design process relied on experimentation. My illustrations for each featured chapter were influenced by the idea of tradition, drawn to look like woodcut prints. This translated to decisions in typography, where I drew inspiration from hand-made, wood block stamps and horror’s gimmicky scratchy scrawl to give the book a sense of timelessness.
