Each motto is sequentially translated through the five most prevalent spoken languages in a given state. For example, Virginia's state motto is 'Thus always to tyrants'. I plugged this into Google Translate and went from English to Spanish, then from Spanish to Korean then into Vietnamese, then Chinese, then Afrikaans and finally back into English where the motto morphed into - 'Therefore it is always a tyrant'.

Each seal is created from a landscape satellite image of the area where Google Earth dropped the pin for that state. I selected the specific images as representative snapshots of a given state or motto, or some combination, based on my own impressions and aesthetics.

As a footnote, a chart is included for each state that tracks the usage over the last 200 years of each state motto as determined and generated by Google NGRAM viewer, which is a phrase­ usage graphing tool that charts the yearly count of selected n­grams (letter combinations) or words and phrases, as found in over 5.2 million books digitized by Google.