Sensoria
The Senses of All Living Creatures
The Challenge
How do you visually represent the totality of the senses across all living things in a single image? That was the question Gavin Van Horn, the editor of Humans and Nature Press, posed for the book’s cover, and the tension that defined the project. The subject demanded a visual language capable of holding vastness, complexity, and perception itself. In exploring how sensing and consciousness operate across species and systems at that scale, it became clear that realism wasn’t going to cut it. To even gesture at an experience this vast, layered, and strange, the design needed to tip into the psychedelic, where overwhelm, curiosity, and awe are kind of the point.
The Client
Humans and Nature Press
Industry
Publishing
Services
Brand Identity | Cover Design | Internal Images
Credits
Art Direction & Design Productions: Mere Montgomery
Project Management: Julie Nygaard
Editors: Gavin Van Horn & Bruce Jennings
The Challenge
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The Senses of all living creatures on earth in one image
The Approach
The cover is a single photograph reflected onto itself, packed with hundreds of objects—natural, human-made, alive, not-so-alive, and somewhere in between. Each item was chosen for its ability to trigger the senses, then stacked, clustered, and crowded until the image becomes too much to take in all at once. That’s intentional. The design invites the viewer to slow down, look longer, and discover what they can sense, rather than trying to “get it” immediately.
The Inspiration
The work draws from Walter Wick’s meticulously chaotic I Spy worlds, the frankly unfair sensory abilities of the mantis shrimp, and the uniquely human impulse to ask big questions and then make weird, beautiful things about them. Curiosity, excess, and close looking were the guiding forces throughout.
slow down, look longer, and discover
Impact & Outcome
The final cover refuses to be skimmed. It asks readers to pause, linger, and engage their senses before they ever crack the spine. By leaning into visual density and sensory overload, the design sets expectations for the book itself: this is not a passive read, but an invitation to notice more, feel deeper, and sit with the strangeness of perception.
