"Still I Rise" refined book

These are a couple of spreads that I revised from a last class. I received a lot of good feedback, mostly about tweaking certain things. So far, I have really enjoyed this project!  

This is the title page of the book. The original page was very big and flashy, and I received the comment that the title page should not give away or take away from the rest of the book. Because the old title page was as flashy as the last and most important page of the book, the title page took away from the last page. I like this composition a lot more because it is simple, but still has the rising effect that I put in all the other spreads that used "still I rise".  

In this spread, the old copy had lines connecting from the last line of text under trod, to the word "dust" on the next page. I decided to take away that line, as well as the one that connected up to the "I Rise" because it did not add any real meaning to composition or any added aesthetic value. I decided to tone down the phrase "and just like dust" on the second page also, because i wanted the emphasis to be one trod and I Rise.  

I also tried to simplify this page. Before, walk was repeated in a gradation, and oil was also repeated to made a bolder , more jagged, oil. I decided to delete the other walks, and just stick with walk being a bit bigger than the rest of the sentence, and then I changed oil into a bolder font, instead of duplicating it a bunch of times. I think this makes a cleaner interpretation of this page.  

This page has given me some troubles, but I think I am close to getting it. The critique I received about this spread was the word "broken" on the top and bottom was unreadable. I switched up the spacing of "broken" and I think it tuned out a lot better. The only thing I am seeing now is where the question mark is broken up, and now there is just two dots on the bottom right side. Not sure if that is to distracting or not.

this page has not changed to much from the last revision, I just deleted the little tear drop illustration and moved the soulful cries sentence down on the right side page to match up with the lowest sentence on the left side. 

again, I have done a couple different takes on this spread, and I think I found something I like. Before this, the HaHaa's took up the entire page. I think it makes it stronger with just the one row of it. Because Angelou did not write in the laughing part, she just laughed in video of it, i though it was appropriate to have it fade into the background, like an afterthought, but still have it big enough that people know it was actually said.