08/14/2026
"Music wouldn't be advertised without design, and design becomes stagnant without employing musical qualities such as rhythm, contrast, and harmony."
Beia Smith-Shaw is a graphic designer and musician who has long understood that the two fields share more than most people realize—the same principles, the same vocabulary, and the same goal of moving an audience.
Her BFA thesis, Headliner, is what happens when those worlds collide: a brand new typeface designed to serve as a visual language for music, built from the rhythms, dynamics, and movement she knows from both sides of the creative process.
To present the work, she needed a format that could keep up. Blurb's layflat book gave every page the full spread it deserved, with no gutters swallowing the details and no small format shrinking the scale of the typography.
Discover "Headliner" in the Blurb Bookstore: https://bit.ly/4z5sQnu