©2025 ORIANA ZHAO
MY WORKS
Publishing+ Layout & Book Cover DesignWorks of Celeste Ng- Redesign
Process
My creative process began with researching the material. Although I had read two of three books she had published, I went back to read all three so I could take notes of symbolism and overlapping themes. From there, I listed all the individual themes, important scenes and symbolism each book focused on and found similarities to tie the series together. I knew from the beginning I wanted to illustrate the book so I also began researching styles and artists I admired that created work that I felt would match the dramatic mood of the work. Notably Katherine Lam, Lushuirou, Jon Mcnaught and many other editorial artists.
However I ran into issues of tying the individual stories together with their themes. As a solution, I eventually found that overlapping themes with play on patterns and repetition being interrupted, to visually communicate isolation, assimilation and drama helped tie the series together. Play with shadows and dark color palettes evoked another somber theme found throughout Ng's work, secrecy.
Lastly, the identical placement of typography evoked cohesiveness and tied the series together as a book collection. The second issue I resolved was the paper. I initially printed the cover on glossy paper, however with feedback and many test prints I discovered a cream linen paper that gave the book covers a grided texture that reflected the patterns found in the design.
The third issue I ran into with this design was having some sort of interaction between the book cover and book jacket, I did not want to take any attention away from the illustrations, but enhance it. So as a solution, I cut out shapes that represented what the main story was trying to resolve, solve or find.
Minced Magazine
Minced is a mock food magazine that specializes on introducing analytical and historical topics and recipes around spices and aromatics.
Articles were sourced from online and credited in the end page. The art direction, font selection, photography, editing, formatting, illustration and cooking are all original work.
Behind the Scenes
MoodboardMY WORKS
Branding | Logo Design | Social Media
Under instruction of Fernando Del Rosario
Team: Abdulla Al-Najjar, Hannah Nguyen, Mallory Cha, Mia Lin, Oriana Zhao, Karla Amaya. Kim Nguyen
Brief: The objective was to create an eye-catching and innovative logo to fit the semesterly club fair: Discoverfest. The overall goal was to have something fun and innovative match the theme of “discover” and translate well onto digital and print marketing.
Client: Jose Rivera-Hernandez & Christopher Estrella-Ramirez
Coordinators at Office of Student Life & Leadership
Deliverables: Logo options for the client to select from.