The perfect-bound book is bound in plain black Stonehenge drawing paper, with an outercover constructed of black matteboard with a black bookcloth spine and a front cover of laser-etched acrylic. This creates a reflective effect that allows readers to engage with the book by viewing their "selfie" over the book's title before they even open it and begin to read its contents. 

Divided into five sections, the book has multiple points of entry for readers to begin where they please. There is a natural progression from the broad to the narrow from beginning to end, but readers are welcome to enter at any point within the narrative. 

Most people don't realize how young the selfie as we know it is (barely thirteen years old!). To emphasize this and highlight some of the important events in its young life, a timeline runs alongside the left side of each History spread with callouts bringing the reader's attention to these moments.

This book is not just intended for millenials for whom the selfie is already integrated into their lives, but also aimed at their parents and the older generations who might not understand the selfie and do much of the judging of it. To help compensate for the varying levels of familiarity with the topic, definitions for various terms that appear throughout the history section are pulled out of the text and made clear via callouts on the sides. So if you weren't entirely sure what duckface was before this.....now you know. 

The dichotomy between taking a selfie and showing a selfie, and what the selfie taker sees versus what the selfie actually shows is something I really wanted to explore in this book. What better entry point than the famous Oscar selfie, taken by Ellen Degeneres when she hosted the Oscars on March 2, 2014? The actual selfie quickly eclipsed the act of taking it, and went on to become the most retweeted message ever on Twitter.

The dichotomy between the real and digital world with the selfie as the bridge between them is played out in the choice to combine photographic and pixelated imagery. 

A number of friends submitted selfies to me for inclusion in the book. These added a nice personal touch and a fair amount of fun, because it's always nice to turn the page and see a familiar (and occasionally funny) face. 

While the other two articles in this section were pulled from other sources, a close friend's older sister offered to write this piece specifically for my book and expand upon the answers she submitted to a survey I had sent out at the beginning of the project. Its intensely personal nature brought a unique aspect to the book, and I'm incredibly grateful to her for contributing it.

In addition to the written piece, Tessa also contributed a number of selfies with explanations of why they meant something to her. These became a series of "conversations" between the two of us, since she noted that she likes to share selfies primarily via text. 

The results of the aforementioned survey were eventually translated into a series of infographics that aimed to represent, on an individual and larger scale, how a group of people ranging in age from 15 to 53, view where selfies fit into their lives. Their answers were incredibly interesting and meaningful, and truly informed how I moved forward throughout the entirety of this project.