Project
Writing, editing, design, and illustration for a book about Charles Lindbergh’s time as a student in Madison.
I was asked to assemble the writing into a coherent narrative and design and produce the book. My work also included an original illustration of Lindbergh’s historic flight to separate the time he spent in Madison before and after he became famous. This book combines many rarely seen photos from the University of Wisconsin archives with two narratives—the main text of the book describes what Lindbergh did at the UW and a side collection of campus events gives some flavor of the university and city at the time he was in Madison. Many photographs bleed off all four sides of the page to make them as large as possible, which is appropriate since they are the focus of the book. One photo was run across two pages. The text was placed in two unequal columns with different type treatments distinguishing the two narratives.
More Pages
I balanced the large full-color picture of Lindbergh alone as a student with a black-and-white smaller picture of him in a crowd after his historic flight. The colors for the title type were chosen by picking out colors from the watercolor illustration.
The left page is the first chapter opening page, with the main narrative in the left larger column and the side story in the right narrower column. The picture bleeds off the right page on all sides to make it as large as possible.
The first part of the book describes Lindbergh’s days as a student; the second part describes the two times he came back to the campus after his historic flight. I created the right page above to summarize the famous flight for readers who might not be familiar with the event and also to act as a separator between the two phases of his life in Madison. Six years after Charles Lindbergh left the UW as a college-dropout he returned as perhaps the most famous man on earth!
Ken Crocker Artist 