The Babylon Lottery.

The Babylon Lottery was a fully realized narrative book project exploring storytelling through design, illustration, materiality, and physical craftsmanship. Inspired by themes of mythology, ritual, memory, and fragmented history, the project combined editorial design with handcrafted production techniques to create an artifact that felt discovered rather than manufactured.

Year

2014

Client

Typography Design

Typography
The Challenge

Every aspect of the experience was designed intentionally, from the visual language and illustration system to the physical construction, binding, texture, and aging of the book itself.

The project explored how design can extend beyond communication into world building and emotional immersion. Rather than functioning as a traditional book, the piece was designed to feel like a recovered object filled with fragmented documents, sketches, artifacts, and traces of a larger hidden story. The challenge was balancing narrative ambiguity with visual cohesion, ensuring every page contributed to a believable and emotionally grounded experience.

Building a World Through Design.

Illustration, typography, texture, photography, and physical materials were combined to create a layered visual language that reinforced the mythology and atmosphere of the piece. Every artifact, annotation, stain, and compositional choice was treated as part of the storytelling system, helping blur the line between graphic design, narrative design, and physical object making.

Creating Artifacts, Not Just Pages.

The experience extended beyond traditional editorial layouts into handcrafted artifacts designed to feel tactile, aged, and historically significant. Custom inserts, distressed materials, textured papers, stamps, sketches, and layered imagery all contributed to the illusion of a lived history. The goal was creating a book that felt immersive and cinematic, where the physical object itself became part of the narrative experience.

Designing Emotion Through Atmosphere.

The visual direction focused heavily on tone, pacing, and emotional resonance. Quiet moments, fragmented compositions, handwritten notes, and distressed imagery were used intentionally to create tension, curiosity, and a sense of discovery throughout the experience. The project explored how design systems and visual storytelling can work together to shape emotion in ways that extend beyond words alone.

The Outcome

A Study in Storytelling Through Design.

The Babylon Lottery became an exploration of how narrative, materiality, illustration, and editorial systems can come together to create immersive experiences that feel deeply human and emotionally grounded. While created early in my career, the project reflects many of the principles that continue to shape my work today, including systems thinking, narrative driven design, visual world building, and designing experiences that invite exploration and emotional connection.

Narrative systems

Story through design.

Illustration, typography, and layout working together to create immersive storytelling.

Physical craft

Built by hand.

Custom binding, distressed materials, and tactile production techniques shaped the experience.

Creative foundation

World building.

An early exploration in emotional storytelling, atmosphere, and experiential design thinking.

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