Steiger Family Tree
The story of one family dating back to the 15th century, in the lines of their new family tree.
This project came to me through networking with family members who I haven’t seen since I was a baby, but met up with again at my grandmothers funeral. Weeks later a guest at the event asked if I would be free to re-design and add the newest members of their family to their outdated family tree. She sent me pictures of photocopies, and gave me some degree of creative freedom. This was a long task as the generations were long and there are many names and dates to be added to this amazing lineage. Despite my own flare and love of colour I decided to keep this design monochrome but I wanted the tree to look more like a tree and less like a graph.
At some point there was a question about leaves, so I sparingly and artfully place leaves.
Examples of the photocopies, I was given to work from…
An unexpected challenge of this project was the fact that it was mostly in German, a language I don’t know. Abbreviations like ‘geb’ for Born and ‘cop’ for married, confused me at the start as not every name has this some have ‘x’ for married and the pictures were not the easiest thing to read.
I started with drawing out on paper how I thought my branches would work. I then had to battle with the name cards and fitting these in, as each card has a different amount of information on it, it then becomes hard to judge how much space each person needs.
I took to Procreate and began the task of slowly fitting it all together.
