Fully Alive

I designed the cover, the interior layout, and the infographics for Fully Alive: Using Your Individuality to Conquer Addiction, a non-fiction recovery book by Michael J. Surdyka.

Surdyka wrote it out of his own recovery — years in and out of rehab before he concluded the programmes had it backwards. They hand everybody the same framework. What finally worked for him was the opposite: the particular shape of his own personality, used as the instrument rather than the obstacle. The book turns that into a method, with self-diagnosis worksheets and a recovery tool he calls The Sobriety Blueprint.

The problem

Addiction recovery is a crowded shelf and a grim one. The visual conventions are clinical or penitential — black covers, broken chains, a figure in silhouette walking toward a light. They all say the same thing, which is that you are broken and this book will fix you.

That is precisely the premise Surdyka’s book argues against. A cover in the house style would have contradicted the first chapter. So the problem I had to solve was not how to make a recovery book look serious. It was how to make one look like it believed the reader was already someone worth being.

The cover

I drew a tree, and made every leaf on it a different colour.

It is the subtitle made visible. Using your individuality is an abstract claim until you see a canopy where no two leaves match and none of them are wrong — green, amber, russet, olive, all on the same trunk. A reader understands the book’s argument before reading a word of it.

Behind it I set a deep slate green rather than black. Sober, but alive — the colour of something growing at dusk. The title sets in a light display serif with generous letterspacing, so the two words carry the top third of the cover on their own, and I put the subtitle beneath in a smaller utility face that lets Individuality and Conquer Addiction take the emphasis the sentence actually wants.

The interior

This is a book people work through, not one they read on a train. That changed the brief for the interior. Worksheets and reading text had to live in the same object without either one feeling like an intrusion.

I set the reading pages for endurance: a comfortable measure, generous leading, and chapter openers that give the eye somewhere to rest before a hard subject starts. Each chapter opens on a drop cap and a display heading — The Decision to Change — so the reader always knows where a new idea begins. For the worksheet pages I kept the same typographic family in a different register, so filling one in feels like part of the book rather than a photocopy stapled into it.

Readable first, handsome second. In a book somebody reaches for on a bad night, legibility is not a craft preference. It is the whole job.

The infographics

The Sobriety Blueprint is the book’s central tool, and a framework only earns that name if a reader can hold it in their head. I used full-colour infographics to carry the parts of the argument that resist paragraphs — comparisons, sequences, thresholds — into a single glance.

I drew them in the cover’s palette, so the charts read as part of the book rather than as illustrations dropped in from elsewhere. I built each one to survive the two ways it will actually be used: studied slowly the first time, and flipped back to months later by someone looking for one number.

Scope of work

• Book cover design — front cover, spine, and back cover for print
• Interior layout design — reading pages, chapter openers, and worksheet pages
• Infographic design — full-colour diagrams supporting The Sobriety Blueprint

A book like this one is a piece of equipment. It gets carried around, marked up, and opened at the worst possible hour. Designing it well means making something a person can use on the day they have the least patience for anything — and that is the standard I hold this kind of work to.