Rwanda: Land of a Thousand Hills
January 2022
Cultural Booklet · Editorial Illustration
Shown in Ball State University's 88th Annual Juried Student Art Show
Process
From rough sketch to production-ready grid.
The brief was to design an editorial booklet that reframes Rwanda through its geography, traditions, and daily culture, using original illustration instead of stock photography. Cover concepts were roughed out by hand first, testing hill silhouettes, sun motifs, and grid structures before anything moved into Illustrator.
Once a direction was picked, every spread was built out on a live column grid, with a small moodboard of type, food-layout, and landscape references pinned alongside for tone.
Moodboard & references
Sketches of clean/airy + sun motif
Sketches of hill & river motif
Mount Karisimbi, in progress
Kwita Izina, in progress
Matoke, in progress
Style guide: type, grid & palette
Final cover design
The Design Challenge
Two registers, one visual world.
This booklet had to hold two different registers — factual/educational content (landmarks, geography, wildlife) and emotional/celebratory content (music, food, community) — without either one feeling like an afterthought. A single color-blocked illustration language (rolling hill silhouettes, a repeating sun motif, consistent character style) ties both halves together.
Landmarks/Geography
Culture & Celebration
Mount Karisimbi spread
One Year Later
Revisiting the Wordmark
About a year after the booklet first showed at Ball State University's Annual Juried Student Art Show, the cover wordmark got a second pass: more weight in the strokes, and more variety in the hill-and-valley curves that tie the letterforms back to Rwanda's landscape — reading more like rolling hills and valleys than the flatter original.
Original · 2022
Revised · 2023
Challenge & Results
One illustrated world, many topics.
The same rolling-hill silhouette, sun, and character style repeats across every spread so a recipe, a hike, and a ceremony all read as one connected world rather than five disconnected assignments.
Intro Spread
Kwita Izina celebration spread
View full booklet spreads