CDF P5 — Taste of China
Introduction
For CDF Project 5, I will create a book about Chinese food. Food plays an essential role in my life and the taste of Chinese food always reminds me of my family and home. I believe that creating this book will help readers better understand the various kinds of Chinese food and how the foods themselves reflect the culture in China.
Design Inspiration
My inspiration is mostly from other cook books. Some examples are listed below.
The inspirations are mostly European and Japanese style. The European style is more modern and simple while the Japanese style is more cute and easy to comprehend. I focus a lot on the grid structure of the cookbooks and where the pictures and texts are placed. How the spread cooperates with each other and how the book makes transitions to different topics is also very useful in helping me design the book.
Part 1: Introduction to Chinese Food
For the first part, I want to talk about Chinese food in general, which includes a general overview of China and the eight most representative types of Chinese cuisine, along with a brief description of the characteristics of those cuisines.
Part 2: Food and Culture
For the second section, I will present some specific examples of Chinese food by dividing them into different themes. I get the pictures through contacting a restaurant in Shanghai called Dragon Palace and they were kind to provide me with the food pictures on their menu.
The reason I contacted the restaurant is because the images I found on the internet don’t have high resolution and the style is relatively inconsistent. Cooperating with a restaurant is the most direct way.
Part 3: Do-It-Yourself
Readers can learn how to cook a popular dish called “Sweet and Sour Pork Ribs” in this section. A detailed description of the food ingredients needed and a step-by-step process will be provided so that readers can make their own food.
Initial Sketches
I sketched some possible ways of organizing content and some grid structures that might be effective in my book. They are as follows.
The sketches focus heavily on creating diverse grid structures and various ways of placing contents and creating interesting interactions. However, I have been focusing too much on variety and neglect the importance of consistency, text hierarchy, and how to lead the readers to first spot the most important content. Furthermore, the grid structure of those sketches is not very clear so I draw a few more sketches to demonstrate my grid more explicitly. I am using column grid for this project.
Initial Digital Iteration
For the first digital iteration, I am trying to design the book according to the grid structure that I have developed. For the front cover, I use a full size image along with a title in the bottom. For the second spread, I use images on one side and contents on the other side and I have a page for table of contents. For the third spread, I list all types of Chinese cuisines and for the fourth and fifth spread, I have an image of food on each page along with the theme it represents, the name of the food, and a short description.
I choose those pages because they reflect some of the effective and ineffective design choices that I made, which are critical in the digital iterations that follows. For the front page, using Didot as the font for the title is classy and draws attention. However, for the paragraph and font for the other titles, I am using the default Adobe font called Minion Pro. That font is not visually attractive and doesn’t come together with Didot. A clear text hierarchy is not established in the above pages. The title, subtitle, and body paragraph looks very similar and there is no sharp contrast between them. The grid structure of the spreads are also inconsistent, especially for the last spread. There is awkward white place and the layout is very different from the previous spreads.
Final Digital Iteration
For the final digital iteration, I decide to use Didot and Georgia as the two main font for my book because Didot is a serif font. I aim to establish a more clear and consistent text hierarchy in my book. Titles and subtitles use Didot and paragraphs use Georgia. The size difference is more obviously so that readers can know which part is more important. I also used a more simple grid structure throughout the book. There are images on one side and texts on the other side. The layout have some differences depending on how many images I want to place in the spread, but the overall structure is consistent. In the final section of making your own Chinese food, the layout is all the same, which is an image paired with a step by step cooking instruction. Even though the layout is simple, the meaning and information that it intends to convey is very clear.
Book Picture
