Viver Para Contar, written by my grandfather, is the story of the Acores islands in Portugal and my grandfather’s own life story. My redesign of this book makes it more accessible to study as a bilingual text, features more photographs (to give more insight), and uses a font I designed based off of old Portuguese maps.
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In 2018, my grandfather wrote a book that included the history and legends of the Acores islands as passed down through his family for generations, as well as an autobiography about his early life in Portugal and experiences immigrating to the United States. He handwrote the book originally in Portuguese, and with the help of family and professionals alike, the book was translated, typed, designed, and a couple dozen copies were published to be shared with friends and family. I am deeply grateful for having such a book of my family history available to me and proud of my grandfather for all of the work that went into it.
The aim in redesigning the book was to make it more accessible as an educational billingual document, and more personal. The original version features the text in Portuguese on every left page, and in English on the opposite right page. However, because the book was made very small, any inclusion of pictures would shift the text so significantly that the text on the left did not match the text on the right, and vice versa. As someone who reads Portuguese almost fluently but struggles with less common or technical terms, of which the book has many, this made looking for translations between pages difficult because the pages did not exactly correspond with one another. It would also be difficult for someone of the opposite situation, totally fluent in Portuguese but proficient in English, trying to read the English side. I wanted this book to be something that people could learn and practice English or Portuguese from, but this would require making the pages match each other exactly so that they could be referenced back and forth. I achieved this through designing and printing the book at a larger scale, while keeping the one language per side format, so that the pages could have images without displacing the text so significantly.
I also decided to include more pictures in my redesign, because they add a personal and human quality to the text that makes is that much more impactful to read. There were some beautiful photos in my family’s posession that I had never seen before in my life, and was shocked were not included in the original print. Some of these included a sweet moment between my grandparents at a family event (page XX), and the cover photo, where my grandfather is seen holding the hand of his youngest sister who passed away at just sixteen. I am certain that anyone looking at these photos, especially in the context of the book itself, will understand some of the emotion I felt in seeing them for the first time.
To start the process, I first established a modern and slightly irregular grid in my InDesign document, so that the pages had the same format but where not vertically symmetrical. I also used for the cover title, capter titles, and XXXXX, the Portuguese-historical-map-inspired font that I designed just a semester before.