“between the world and me” Book Cover

“black people love their children with a kind of obsession.
you are all we have, and you come to us endangered ”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is a reimagined book cover design for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s breakthrough book, Between The World and Me. This book is framed as a letter to Ta-Nehisi’s adolescent sons as they mature into becoming black, adult men. In the book, Coates explains the rather dystopian realities that come with being a black male in America and the underlying theme of destroying a black boy’s innocence is what informed my design process. 

The incredibly harsh and mature realities Ta-Nehisi illustrates to these young black boys can only be internalized through a juvenile lens. I wanted to illustrate that contrast by using hand-done, child-like illustrations and hand-lettering to show these incredibly mature representations of Black American life.