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 Information School. This project presented the opportunity to document the organization’s milestones and share the powerful stories of its members.

Areas of work

Information Architecture
Design
Production
Photography

Challenges

When designing the book, a challenge our team faced was balancing the length of the stories and the use of images to create a cohesive narrative. We wanted each component to complement the other. With this, we spent time digging through photographs in our archive to ensure there was a through line that showed the evolution and connection between the past and the present. An important part of the work was spent crafting a story that would be informative and make readers feel the strength of the Casa Latina community members.

Strategy

The design process for the book emphasized photographs with member stories as a complementary tool to bring context to the images. In the end, the images and stories would work together to tell the mission, vision, and 30-year trajectory of a worker center.

As this project was meant for our membership, who are predominantly Spanish-speaking, this book had to also be available in both English and Spanish. To reduce clutter and improve legibility by not putting both languages on one page, we designed the book to be read in English in one orientation, and once flipped, in Spanish. Finding an elegant solution was a high priority as we did not want to compromise the experience by adding clutter and creating confusion.

Additionally, we designed a complementary installation displayed at our 30th Anniversary Gala. This installation included a timeline of the organization’s milestones as well as language for people to read our book and learn more.