The Pandemic

I remember that sunny March morning, 2020, when while riding the subway on my way to work, I looked at the people on the train and noticed more of them were wearing masks. My thoughts were dismissive and also arrogant in that I was sure that “that virus”, Covid 19, would never reach NYC. Two months later my office closed and I was furloughed. It was tough, not only because I have never been furloughed before but also because I was experiencing a lot of uncertainty about the future. After a month, I decided to leave NYC and go back home to Puerto Rico to be with my family.

In parallel, during this time, my mother and aunt were writing a book about their lives and our family. My mother recognized that this was the perfect “parenthesis” to make the book a reality and so I joined the team and we went to work. A year later, after months of revisions, designs and changes we finally finished it. This book anchors our memories, recipes and accomplishments as a family so that younger generations have a timeline and a vision of their past relatives and their heritage. It is a gift from us and we plan to give it as a present in a future family gathering.

The Challenge

The first challenge was to find the correct “look and feel”. The design needed to represent stories that not only went back to the 1940’s but also embody my family’s spirit, and diverse cultural backgrounds. After several trial and error combinations and mood boards, I landed with a warm color palette and a combination of a serif and sans serif fonts. For the graphics, I combined the beauty of photographs with different textures, such as handwritten recipe cards, herb leaves and hand-drawn illustrations.

The Layout

The book needed a flexible grid in order to accommodate various types of information such as; text, side bars, recipes, photo albums and articles.

The book

We spent hundreds of hours selecting photos and recipes. Ultimately the result is a book that truly reflects my family’s spirit and my mom’s and aunt’s memories of their life.

The Website

Since my close family lives in: Puerto Rico, USA, Panamá, México and Italy, I decided to design and build a website where friends and family can access the book by downloading a PDF. This way it can be shared more widely.