This book is an accumulation of 20 years of hard and meaningful work. It is a celebration for the whole purpose of the Hungarian American Coalition. It needed to be readable, sophisticated and somehow pay tribute to the Hungarian culture. In the sketching process I realized that by enlarging the intricate pattern of a common Hungarian textile design (used also for their logo) I could modernize it by simply placing it on a grid. It gave it both a look of needlepoint and bitmapping. It was a wonderful combination of old and new.
The Coalition felt strongly that a photograph of each major contributor be shown on the cover. At first this seemed impossible since there was no way to get one photo of each person and the photos that we were able to collect were a motley bunch of snapshots, all of varying quality. The grid of the artwork lent itself nicely to a home for small portraits of each contributor. This solved the problem of low-resolution images as well as figuring out how can we show all these different people in one unified design.
The grid needlepoint motif was carried out throughout the book from the table of contents to the timeline to the pull quotes. The effort was to keep a consistent theme without over-playing it.
