The Office Books That Should Exist

Let’s be honest: I’ve watched The Office more times than I’m willing to admit in a professional setting. It’s basically my white noise. But being a designer with an overactive brain, I always got stuck on the details—specifically, the masterpieces the characters claimed to be writing but never actually showed us.

So, I decided to fix that. I took the briefest mentions from the script and turned them into full-fledged visual identities. This wasn’t just fan art; it was a branding exercise in character study.

The challenge was to capture the soul of each character in a book cover:

• Michael Scott’s Somehow I Manage: The magnum opus. I designed this to look exactly like the generic business self-help book Michael thinks he belongs on, complete with his shrug pose and rolled up sleeves on the cover. It screams "unearned confidence."
• Michael Scott’s The Fundamentals of Business: Yes, he has two. This one is the "textbook" version—stiffer, more corporate, and trying desperately to look like it belongs on a syllabus next to Jack Welch.
• Pam Beesly’s The Horse Flyer: A complete pivot in style. For Pam, I stripped away the corporate stiffness and went for a whimsical, illustrative aesthetic that honors her art school dreams (and is definitely better than her Dunder Mifflin mural).
• Kelly Kapoor’s The Business Bitch: High-gloss, pink, and absolutely unapologetic. It’s branding for the personal brand era, long before influencers were a thing.
• Toby Flenderson’s A Murder for Framing: I went for that gritty, airport-paperback noir aesthetic that screams "Chad Flenderson" trying too hard to be mysterious.

The result is a collection of tangible assets from a fictional universe. It was a way for me to flex my ability to adapt design styles—from corporate to illustrative to noir—while finally justifying my 10th rewatch of Season 4 as "research."