How the Other Half Lives

Objective: Create a redesign of a How the Other Half Lives; a classic book, which was banned for revealing the horrendous living conditions in the slums of New York in the 1880s. The redesign helps show how large of an issue homelessness is today.

Strategy/Solution: My goal was to complete a redesign of a classic banned book, giving it a contemporary message by incorporating current statistics of California homelessness. Even though this book was written over 100 years ago, homelessness is still as big of an issue as it was back in the 1890s. To accomplish this, I decided to research homelessness in California for the year 2017. During the research I found statistics that reflected the chapters within the original book. The research consisted on different percentages related to race, age, money as well as the current number of homelessness.  

On the pages that didn’t have statistics, I used original photographs that Jacob Riis (the author and photojournalist) took. The original book had etchings of the original photographs, but I wanted to bring back the photographs. The etchings were beautiful but I wanted to show the reality in detail to the reader, by using the photographs that the author took. 

To incorporate the theme I was going for, which included using sepia for the statistics and chapter titles, I bound the book in a sepia book cloth as well. For the book jacket, I researched a New York skyline for the 1890s, and created a silhouette that wrapped around the cover. Then incorporated silhouettes of the “stereotypical homeless person” that’s seen today, onto the front and back jacket.

Programs: Adobe Illustrator | Indesign