Pamela Maitland Carter
Poetry, podcasts, and art brought to life with splendiferous design.
My grandmother, Pamela Maitland Carter, has been writing poetry and painting for decades. Leveraging my design and development knowledge, I’ve constructed a full personal brand for her, complete with monogram and website, as well as helped her publish material such as books and podcasts.
Poetry Books
Utilising my extensive experience with software such as Adobe’s Creative Cloud, I compiled many of her poems into a four-volume set of print books.
Designing around poetry was a challenging task, as poems place much more emphasis on typesetting than standard prose. Poems have specific line breaks and spacing, non-standard alignments, variable line lengths, and a range of other typographical and layout considerations that are pushed to the forefront given the often minimal text content.
The books feature a combination of stock photos, my own photography, and scanned archive images where relevant. Many of these archival photos were in black and white, so I had to meticulously colourise them. Others were extremely old and stored in poor conditions, which required me to laboriously restore them to presentable states.
Beyond crafting a polished set of books, the entire process proved an excellent opportunity to broaden my knowledge of print publication and design for physical mediums – something I had sorely been lacking.
Website and Branding
As part of creating her books, making them easily accessible through the web was important. Having a website on which her books can be presented alongside further material and information was important.
Also important was ensuring her website kept the general style defined by her books. This meant leaning into the careful, serifed type and exploring a gentle palette, which I think was achieved. It also meant defining some stronger personal branding.
She signs each painting with her name or initials. Based on this, I expanded out a full wordmark and stylised monogram to represent her. It is simple, yet distinctive and true to her original signature.
She also decided she wished to publish a podcast, which is neatly integrated into her site. Each episode is edited by myself to improve the listening experience and then uploaded to her site. Her site references these episodes in a format understood by popular podcasting platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Music for syndication.
You can view the site at pamcarter.net.