I Have a Dream

Take the entire text of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and present it in a uniquely compelling way.

I HAVE A DREAM is a 60pp hardcover book that renders the entire text in English Braille, with select highlights typeset in regular English.

Identity + Mark  |  Photography  |  Editorial Design + Layout  |  Copy Writing + Editing 

I was interested in trying a few new things with this project; first, I wanted to design a project that was completely in grayscale. Second, I wanted to try something with Braille. And third, I wanted gatefolds to be part of the layout.

I listened to recordings of King orating "I Have a Dream" several times to both understand the cadences of his delivery and where he emphasized certain words and phrases. I decided that the entire speech would be rendered in Braille, but only some elements would be excised from the text and typeset in English.

At the Library for the Blind and Print Disabled (San Francisco Public Library), I was able to output the entire text of King's speech in English Braille. I then scanned all of the pages in order to use them as graphic elements.

Often the Braille dots form backgrounds.

I printed a number of pages on vegetable vellum, which gives the piece extra layers and interaction between the typesetting and the output Braille pages.

Variety in scale was one of the things I played with the most throughout the book.

I included a few gatefolds in the layout to emphasis particular lines of the speech, something I had not done in a publication project before.

I close the book in stating, "These words of Martin Luther King Jr. spoken on August the twenty-eighth, nineteen hundred and sixty-three at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. are rendered in this format in the hopes that all of humanity shall one day be truly blind to hatred. A blindness not of hindrance, but of freedom."

With the exception of English Braille, I typeset I HAVE A DREAM exclusively in various weights of Gotham in all capitals.

The color palette is only black, white, and shades of gray.