I began to integrate physical collage into my design process when designing an unofficial cover and layout for Laurie Penny’s Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism.

The cover features a centered, close-up image of surgical hands performing on an open incision, accompanied by a saturated, pink, veiny skin texture and serif text. The opening page presents the reader with a mother and child in black and white, their skin removed to reveal chunks of raw butcher meat, contrasted by a bright red background.

After first consulting my own stash of magazine clippings, I searched Adobe Stock for images of raw meat, surgical procedures, and human skin. Whatever digital images I found, I would print off on the Xerox and use them as any other found paper material. The image of the mother and child came from a vintage magazine, while everything else was found digitally. Everything was hand-cut with an X-Acto knife and pasted with rubber cement.

Only after my physical process did I then scan my images and digitally alter them as appropriate. Expanding my source materials to the digital world gave me the opportunity to create a design that is both unique in process and complimentary to the text I was designing for.