Execution:

The first design that I had made was one titled “L.J.”, and I wanted the album to serve as an introduction, or beginning, to the series. With this in mind, I made “L.J.” focus on his background, his family and where he speaks, as well as touching on his native language. The front cover features a childhood photo of L.J., and the text “Have you eaten yet?”, which he had said in the interview that that was his family’s way of showing love. It is also important to note that throughout the albums, I had made some of the text is Bisayaan, which is L.J.’s first language, in order to capture that part of himself and his culture as well.

In the album titled “70/30”, I wanted to address the parts of the interview where L.J. had talked about the discrimination that he had faced. The title “70/30” touches on his statement in which he said that throughout his life, it has been a 70/30 scale on acceptance versus prejudice. In our interview, he discussed how he would bring traditional Filipino food to school for lunch, and the kids around him would be visibly disgusted. I wanted to incorporate this into the album, by making a collage of a child who is visibly disgusted by a plate of Filipino food in front of her.

For the final album, I wanted it to represent the final chapter of the series, and so I had made the focus on the future. The parts of the interview that this album had focused on were the parts in which we had discussed the future of AAPI representation. I titled this album “Sa Umaabot”, which is Bisayaan for “I feel visible”, and I wanted to focus the design on this concept. The view of a mountainside was something that I had associated with the idea of being “visible”, as well as representing an optimistic future, so I wanted to incorporate that image into the design. When L.J. had sent me some images from when his family had visited the Philippines, among those images was a photo of a mountainside, and I knew that it would be perfect for what I was wanting.