- Designer: Jackson Alves
- Client: Justin BUA
- Category: Print Design — Book Covers
- Location: Orlando, Florida, United States
- Project Brief: Design and refine the print identity for The Book of Hip-Hop, a 372-page publication celebrating Hip-Hop culture through custom gothic chapter lettering, refined typography, a print-focused color palette, and carefully managed production.
Book covers for big art books can pull from very old traditions, and this one makes hip-hop history look like a family Bible. The Book of Hip-Hop is a 372-page collection of one artist’s paintings of the culture’s legends, bound in black with gold foil and gold-edged pages.
The title “The Book of Hip-Hop” is stacked in a gothic blackletter that Jackson Alves reworked just for this book. Under it, “Justin BUA Version” sits in small gold capitals inside a thin gold frame.
Little gold silhouettes of b-boys, a DJ, and dancers fill the four corners, the spots where you’d expect saints on an old prayer book. A pressed floral border runs around the cover, with a portrait at the top and a vinyl record at the bottom.
Open it up and the same blackletter heads each chapter, sitting above plain two-column text with lots of breathing room. Big paintings spread across both pages, like a long-nosed Snoop Dogg puffing a cigar, next to short notes from the artist in italics.
