#revolutionisingmentalhealth

Human Givens Journal

A biannual publication for psychotherapy practitioners, covering psychology, mental health research and therapeutic practice.

Intro

I designed and produced nine issues of the Human Givens Journal, a biannual publication for psychotherapy practitioners. Working across every issue from December 2019 to December 2023, I was responsible for cover design and internal artworking throughout.

At a glance...

The work

The journal operated within an established editorial system, the role was less about reinventing the design and more about executing it consistently across a complex, text-heavy publication. Each issue required careful layout work to handle long-form articles, and varied content types within a consistent grid.

The cover design was a different kind of challenge. Each cover needed a concept that responded to the issue’s theme, something that would create visual interest on a shelf or in an inbox without straying from the journal’s professional tone.

QuarkXpress to Indesign

Shortly after joining, I led the migration of the journal from QuarkXPress to InDesign. There was no clean export path between the two applications, so the process involved rebuilding the existing layout template from scratch in InDesign — recreating the grid, styles and typographic system as closely as possible. Font compatibility issues had to be worked through along the way. Once complete, the new InDesign template became the production foundation for every subsequent issue.

For one issue, I contributed original artwork to the cover. The theme — consciousness, perception, and what we pay attention to — drew on work I had made as part of an earlier personal project, Excess Pixels. AI describes the resulting image as a figure viewed from behind, face replaced by a reflective void set against a deep starfield, a spectrum of light bleeding through. I describe it as an enjoyable evening’s work. It proudly ran as the cover for Volume 28, No. 2, 2021.