Would You Like A Side Of Plot With Your Tropes?

Student Project, 2023

Dissertation

A study of how BookTok's Trope Marketing has impacted readers and authors. The dissertation was hand-bound by me with a screen-printed cover design. The design was inspired by Clothbound Penguin Classics and its style of using icons inspired by the contents of the story as repeated patterns. An annotation format was used within the writing to mimic the current trend on BookTok (a TikTok sub-community of readers) of annotating books.

Click here to read the full dissertation

Full of Tropes

This was the design outcome inspired by my dissertation. They are interactive flip books that show the process of deconstruction and reconstruction of 4 of BookTok’s favourite stories. Each flip book has a standardised trope list on tracing paper that overlays the original story. The new story that adheres to the trope list is revealed on acetate that overlays both the original story and the trope list.

The purpose of this outcome was to show the audience that if Tropes were the foundation of these popular stories, they would not have flowed as well as they did.

I wrote a short story based on one of these storylines as a sample manuscript to show how the story would have turned out had it followed this full of tropes structre.

Click here to read the short story

As a final touch for this project, I designed a book cover design for each of the story. I used a cartoon illustration style for the covers because they are currently a popular cover style for YA Novels currently where most of them look much like these.

Process Journal

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