The Map: From Autopilot to Awareness Book Project

The Map: From Autopilot to Awareness is a self-help and psychology book co-authored by Dr. Alice Marieke Baldock and Diana Martin Odell, published by D&A Publishing in 2026. Subtitled A Doctor's Journey Inside the Therapy Room: A Guide to Understanding Yourself, Changing Direction, Reclaiming Control, the book explores mental well-being from both a patient's and a therapist's perspective — weaving clinical insight with lived experience into a single, coherent narrative.

Involvement: Visual Director

I led the visual direction for the book from the ground up: developing the brand identity, illustrating each chapter opener, designing the cover, and laying out the full manuscript. The book's title gave me the central visual metaphor — a lone figure, a road, a mountain — which runs through the cover and recurs across the six chapter illustrations, each one built from the same navy-and-golden palette but shifting in composition to match its theme, from the wide, open horizon of the introduction to the tightening, more claustrophobic framing of chapters on judgement and control. Deep indigo carried the clinical, reflective register of the writing, while a warm amber-to-gold gradient stood in for the moments of clarity the book is ultimately guiding readers toward. That same system extended into the interior layout — restrained, generous with white space, with amber used sparingly to mark chapter starts and pull quotes — and into a set of Instagram assets for the book's launch, so the identity held together across the physical book, the Kindle edition, and social.

🔗 Available to purchase here.