Moments Like This Never Last
Spring 2026Course: Content to Cover: The Design of BooksInDesign
Tyler Mitchell is a photographer whose work explores beauty and desire. Most of the images in this work are selected from his book I Can make You Feel Good, a collection of images depicting a Black utopia.
My selection of Mitchell’s work portrays the important moments of life that we don’t want to pass us by.
In this book I pair Mitchell’s photography with Mary Oliver’s poem “What Do We Know” and an article published in Time Magazine written by Andrew Gregory titled “How Social Media is Hurting Your Memory”. The thesis of the work comes from a painting of the same name (2012) by Dan Colen depicting a scene of confetti falling.
Case
The work is housed in a case wrapped in black book cloth with an engraved shape that echoes a smartphone.
Inside the space for the smartphone sized flipbook is the colophon.
Cover
The title of the work is spread across the front and back cover. By revealing only the first half of the title, “Moments Like This”, in the beginning, paired with an emotionally charged photograph, the cover sets up the tone of the book to be about the precious moments of life, whether bright or dark.
By the end of the book, “Never Last” takes on a double meaning. First, that these moments are fleeting so we must appreciate them as they happen, and second, that if we let our phones win we will not even know they are passing by.
Format
The book holds two worlds at once. The first is that of an emotionally lush reality, which is visually captured by Mitchell’s photography and narrated by Oliver’s poem.
Interrupting this space are smart phone sized short sheets, printed on a shinier paper than the rest of the book. They show the selected text from Gregory’s article, detailing how the presence of smartphones worsens our memories of moments small and large.
The images presented on the short sheets are cropped to a square, mimicking the (then) typical Instagram format. Colorful, pixel reminiscent squares slowly take over the images.
Flipbook
The flip book features Mitchell’s photography, cropped again to a square. As you flip the book the images scroll past in an Instagram-like fashion. This changes your experience of Mitchell’s photography emphasizing how when you scroll, you remember less.
The flip book is printed on the same shiny paper as the short sheets.
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