Go the F*** to Sleep Illuminated Letterform
Created in spring 2025 for ADN 502 (Visualizing Narrative)
Prompt: Choose one of the following banned books. Write down 5-10 qualities that describe your story. Pick a base font that you want to base your illustrated letterform upon. Choose one or more of your qualities to create a unique, hyperbolic, illustrated letterform. You may choose to incorporate a lot of detail to show a pivotal scene, or summarize the theme/moral of the book through the qualities of the form itself. Use a significant letter from the story and draw your illuminated letterform by hand. Scan your illuminated letterform and convert to a vector file. Colorize in Illustrator in 3 ways: black and white, 2 color, and full color. Print on 8.5×8.5″ paper.
My Banned Book: Go the F*** to Sleep by Adam Mansbach.
Qualities: expletive, children, parenting, animals, night, bedtime, satirical, whimsical, colorful.
Sketches
Iterations
After deciding which sketch I wanted to design, I played around with adjusting fill and stroke color to make the dreamscape fill the most cohesive and ensure no one object had too much visual weight. I went from no fill with white line, to entirely white fill with black line, to a mixture of white and black fills and lines. The last iteration added a couple of exhausted parents in the bottom city image to emphasize the theme of the story.
Final Products
Since the book was banned due to its frequent expletives, I chose the letter “F”, inspired by the font family Bodoni and stylized to look like a cloud. Inside, children are performing fantastical–even dangerous–activities, rather than going to sleep.
Check out the next project I did about Go the F*** to Sleep.