For this assignment we were asked to pick a topic that is uniquely American and to create a visual language around that concept. The concept that I chose was family road trips.  The thesis that I used for the article that I wrote argued that road trips were an essential right of passage for many families growing up, and because of that it was a common thread between different generations. The body copy ultimately became a love letter to my childhood and the road trips that I got to take with my family.

 

The imagery that I used to support this idea are all my own personal photography of myself and my family on various road trips spanning over ten years. I treated each of these images similarly by aging them in Photoshop, creating custom filters, and subduing the color palette to appear older.

 

For each of the spreads I used a two-column grid for all of the text, but also chose to break the grid for the images: the idea behind that was that the text would remain neat and orderly but the images were allowed to be more spontaneous and less organized. The thought process that I had when creating my grid is that the text would be the neat and orderly plan that all families start out with. However, the text was sometimes forced to shift around the images. The images were meant to resemble the spontaneous moments that aren't always planned during road trips but makes each trip unforgettable and one of a kind.