Stories of Resilience and Community:
Book Design

To commemorate Casa Latina’s 30-year anniversary, a book was developed in collaboration with Humanities Washington and graduate students at the University of Washington’s School. This project presented the opportunity to not only document the organization’s milestones but also share the powerful stories of its members.

Areas of work

Information Architecture
Design
Production
Photography

Challenges

When designing the book we tried to create a balance between the length of the stories and the placement of the images to create a cohesive narrative. With this, we also spent time digging photographs in our archive to ensure there there was representation between the past and the current. An important portion of the work was to crafting a flow for the narrative that would be informative, engaging, built off of one another, and captured the essence of Casa Latina’s community.

Strategy

The design framework for the book emphasized photographs with the the member stories being a complementary tool to to bring context to the images. In the end the images and stories would work together to tell the stories of Casa Latina from its beginning to present day.

As this project was meant for our membership, who are predominantly Spanish speaking, this book had to also be designed in both English and Spanish. To reduce clutter and not have both languages on one page, we designed the book to be read in English in one orientation, though if flipped it could be read in Spanish. Finding an elegant solution was a high priority as we did not want to compromise the experience of reading the book by taking up value real estate with excessive elements.

Additionally, to increase exposure of this book project we designed a complementary installation that was placed at our 30th Anniversary Gala. This installation included a timeline of our organization milestones as well as language for people to read our book and learn more.