Creating visual world for 4 powerful speculative fictional stories by authors across geographies exploring futures shaped by migration, care, grief and memory.

We were invited to create artworks that didn’t just decorate the stories but lived inside their worlds—holding their tensions, dreams, and emotional resonance.

• Capture each story’s emotional undercurrent: tension, warmth, unease, rebellion.
  
• Use visual metaphors to expand—not explain—the stories.
  
• Reflect the speculative tone with worldbuilding elements: interfaces, textures, and symbolic motifs.
  
• Ensure characters are depicted with dignity, avoiding tropes of victimhood or erasure.

• Afrofuturist, queer, and diasporic design languages
• Retro-futurism and lo-fi sci-fi motifs
• Emotional abstraction—using color, scale, and visual rhythm to evoke affect

Where possible, we integrated interface design, urban decay, biotech flora, and story-specific metaphors (like AI companions, ancestral data clouds, and digital threads).

2. Moodboard to Manifestation
We began by moodboarding each story’s universe—imagining what light might feel like, what kind of weather their worlds hold, how memory and grief might look in color.

From there:


• We created sketches that prioritized mood over realism
• We played with scale—characters often appeared small in large systems, or monumental when reclaiming agency
• We layered textural motifs—glitches, wiring, fabric patterns, glowing code—to reinforce speculative tension

3. Characters as Anchors

In every artwork, we grounded the composition around a character moment—not as portraiture, but as narrative punctuation.

For example:


• K’ima standing under a data tree shedding digital leaves (Algorithm of Grief)
• Isra holding a carved turnip against algorithmic judgment (Disclosure)
• The AI machine, glowing like a votive shrine, holding space for memory processing (ATLR)
• A returned ancestor, blurred into reflections and surveillance glass (Thirteen Ways…)

• Speculative ambiguity: These weren’t worlds to explain—they were worlds to feel. We resisted literalism, embracing atmosphere and metaphor.
  
• Emotional clarity: While the stories were rich in concept, our visuals had to distill their emotional truths quickly—especially for readers encountering them without context.
  
• Avoiding dystopia fatigue: Many speculative stories about data and surveillance lean dark. We aimed to weave in tenderness and radical softness, even when portraying rupture.

• The illustrations became anchor visuals for the stories—used in promotions, digital platforms, and discussion circles.
  
• Readers shared how the art made the stories feel more immersive, saying they “felt seen and transported.”
  
• Writers noted that seeing their stories visualized brought new layers of meaning to their work.