Every year the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) awards a juried literary prize for the best recent visual arts publication by a member of its faculty. Net proceeds from the Literary Lions Luncheon support the SAIC Literary Lions Endowment Fund, established to provide institutional grants for SAIC faculty research.

Much like how the Tonys are never actually called The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre, no one refers to the Jean Goldman Book Prize by its proper name, preferring instead the nom de plume, Literary Lions. Using that as a starting point, I worked through various ideations, and kept returning to a core concept of how handwriting is intrinsic to the creation of books. From hand-jotted notes and ideas, to writing drafts and marking revisions. This informed the design direction resulting in an elegant hand-lettered typographic solution that can also lend itself to various print production processes such as foil-stamping or embossing.