Distilling to its Ingredients: Layouting a Booklet on Baking
To apply concepts of grid and layout for print media, I designed a simple booklet that described the ingredients you’ll need for baking.
Ingredients You’ll Need
5" x 5" Booklet, 60lbs paper, translucent paper vellum
Print/Illustration/Copy
2019
Individual Project
Rong Kang, Chew
with art from VectorStock (various artists), and photography from Pink Box Bakery, Live Well Bake Often, Taste of Home, Baking a Moment, America’s Test Kitchen, Sally’s Baking Addiction.
Research & Concept
As an avid baker (chocolate lava cakes are my signature treat!), I still sometimes struggle to understand the different ingredients in my baking, and often have to refer back to online guides when needing to substitute or experimenting. A therefore decided that I wanted to make a book on baking for my final project in Communication Design Fundamentals at Carnegie Mellon University.
I started with a researching modern cookbook layouts, there are however many variations — with the use of top-down photography and modern geometric fonts becoming a growing trend, instead of serif fonts and angled photographs.
I decided that I would focus on each ingredient by itself to describe its different characteristics, and show examples of how it is used. This would allow me to convey the important information of each ingredient. My identified ingredients were: Flour, Leaveners (Eggs), Sugar, Butter & Dairy, Chocolate and Fruit & Spices.
Design Process
I used Adobe InDesign to layout the spreads for this book, and started with a simple design that would have each ingredient take up its own section. Each ingredient would then have a few photos of desserts that showcase that ingredient. I used a general 6-column layout, and decided to limit myself to a 5" by 5" square to keep to a booklet format.
Experimenting with Overlays
During classtime, our instructor Suzanne showed us some previous work that used translucent vellum paper that overlaid another layer on top of a opaque layer. I wanted to use a similar concept to try to overlay information about baking on top of the desserts. (The vellum material also reminded me about baking paper!)
I did a two basic layouts for Chocolate in order to test the idea of using the vellum overlays, one with photography, and the other for illustrations. I found that for both tests, the overlays did not add not a lot of value to the layout, and made it difficult to appreciate both the text and the imagery.
I was a little dismayed that the end result was not as expected, but upon advice of Suzanne, I decided to leave the concept of overlays to the section headers. I pulled this header out into another page, and used a circular overlay that encapsulated the illustration with words describing the formats of the key ingredient.
The test for this layout was well-received by my peers during class critique, and an unintentional side effect of using the circular format was that there was leeway for some misalignment between the overlay and the illustration. This actually happened for my final result, as the vellum paper was hand-cut and the laser printer did not print at the same position when doing double-sided printing.
As this book would be a mix of both regular and vellum paper, I needed to count the number of pages so that the overlays would end up on the vellum paper on both halves of the book. I made a mock-up booklet on folded paper to verify that it actually matched up. I was pretty glad at the end result after all, and felt the hard work did pay off for experimenting with the overlays.
Keeping it Simple
With the header pulled out to the new section, and without overlays on top of the photography, I now had more space to try out different layouts for the information about the photographs.
I tried out two ideas that had the information mirror the layout of the photos to denote what it was describing. One used a simple grid of squares, and the other tried to mimic pieces of chocolate in an isometric format.
I received feedback that both layouts felt a little congested, especially that with the isometric chocolate which constrained both the text and the images that were cropped within. The shape of the chocolate also made it hard to see the dessert within as it imposed another shape upon its figure.
I decided to take a step further beyond using a grid of squares, and simplified the layout to only feature one hero image. This way, the photography could shine, and there was more space for text as well. I re-wrote the text to describe more about the ingredient, and have a blurb below about the dessert along with the photo credit. This new layout felt a lot more readable and pleasant to the eye.
Overall, I was quite pleased with the end result of the booklet, and felt that it accomplished its desired goal of educating readers about the all the Ingredients You’ll Need for baking in an interesting and unique format. Given more time, I would certainly like to experiment with more interesting layouts, and also come up with original art for the illustrations under each of the overlays. One day I perhaps will publish this booklet to help new and novice bakers.
