Food As a Font
At BentoBox we have the privilege of merging design with restaurants every day. Today we are doing the same but in a different way. Instead of creating restaurant websites, we have created fonts out of food items. Below we have transformed our favorite snacks and beverages into a legible alphabet that is a tasty treat for the eyes.
FRENCH FRIES
When first hearing about this project I immediately started thinking about what food items possessed a modular shape as an easy way to convert it into a font. For this reason, I landed on french fries. We are blessed to live in a world where potatoes can be cut into many lovely shapes, but I decided to go with crinkle-cut fries because they have so much character. I gave them that beautiful golden-brown, deep-fried color, complete with salt flakes and a dipping of ketchup to denote uppercase letters.
Written & designed by James Coviello
ICE CREAM
When we were first brainstorming ideas for this post I had so many ideas I wasn’t sure where to start. The initial inspiration was a font based on pasta so at first I wanted to use a food that lent itself to curved shapes that could easily be manipulated into letters. After the initial brainstorm I realized we needed a font made out of something sweet and ice cream just seemed like the natural best option. Right away I wanted to use a waffle cone texture for the letter and have ice cream on top and dripping down a little bit, evoking a melting ice cream cone on a hot summer day. After applying the waffle cone texture I added the ice cream in Photoshop but it still felt a little flat — so obviously my next thought was sprinkles! Lastly, I added the cherries on top to denote uppercase letters and some highlights. Trying to keep it simple was a big challenge here, but overall I’m very happy with how it turned out.
Written & designed by Kai Malowany
TACOS
My first thought about this project was that I wanted something colorful and fun, so Mexican food immediately came to mind. I narrowed it down to tacos since they’re the first thing you think of when it comes to Mexican food, and they have enough elements to work with, like texture, colors, and dimension. I kept the overall design simple since each letter has multiple layers and components. The design process was very similar to preparing a taco. I started with the shells by making them chunky and texturized, and then I designed my ingredients, like lettuce, tomatoes, meat, and cheese. Once they were completed, I just started filling the letters with the ingredients!
Written & designed by Isabella Ambrosio
COCKTAILS
I certainly took a more abstract approach to the food as a font prompt, choosing to make cocktails that generally resembled each letter. This was quite the challenge as generally, cocktail glasses don’t have a lot of variety, so I had to get creative with shapes for these imaginary drinks. I created the sketches in Procreate, then brought them into Illustrator to make definitive outlines, and lastly pulled them into Photoshop to apply color and dimension. Each glass uses a slightly different method to represent the letter, the “A” uses an orange slice and indent in the bottom of the triangular glass to convey the blank space in the letter while B is composed of 2 spherical drinks held on a metal stand.
Written & designed by Lindsey Robinson
Ice cream, tacos, french fries and even a cocktail? Sounds like an enjoyable meal, and hopefully you have enjoyed seeing our take on foods as fonts. We had so much fun putting this together, it was definitely a creative challenge and got us thinking more about what goes into making a font work. Stay tuned, as always, for more cool and creative projects from the BentoBox Design Team!
