Project Four
Process Documentation
Book Series
For the book series I decided to do 3 cookbooks in a series by Food52: Mighty Salads, Vegan, and Ice Cream & Friends. The original book covers featured a background photo with food in a very rustic style.
The backs of the original covers had featured a selection of photographs representing some recipes within the book, they also included a short preview text about the cookbook.
Inspirations
As a first step, I looked up various cookbook covers, with some specificities to size. Because our books needed to fit within the constraints of 11x17, I was more interested in cookbooks that did not follow the typical sizings of a cookbook. Some themes among the book covers I geared towards for this project included the use of symbols, minimalistic layouts, and simple illustration.
Preliminary Concept Sketches
For my sketches I kept in mind to keep the design as simple as possible, this was mainly because the cookbooks were to be smaller than regular sized and I didn’t want to cramp up the given spaces. It was also important to me that the series could be identified as cookbooks just from the cover design. Since most cookbooks generally feature photographic images of food or ingredients on the covers, I wanted to use simple symbols or illustrations of food to indicate the genre of the books.
I liked the idea of having the illustrations arranged in a non-uniform way, and allowing the letters of the title to go on top or peek from behind the illustrations. I also liked the designs with secondary borders around the titles (sketches #1, 4). I wanted the cover background colors to be the boldest element in the designs and so I geared towards a more minimal typeface and simple illustrations.
Digital Iterations
I started sketching the illustrations of food first because it was one of the most important parts of my design. However as I was sketching I realized that it was going to be not only very hard to achieve the style of illustration that I wanted but also very time consuming because even within the three covers there were several different drawings of vegetables, ingredients, etc. The left side image includes the drawing style I wanted to achieve, I liked the rustic feel of the non-perfect line drawings.
So I decided to change the illustration style to as simple as possible, and used a lot of perfect circles for many of the food icons. Also since the illustrations became more minimal I opted for more representational colors of the foods being illustrated, e.g. tomato red, eggplant purple, etc.
I also liked the idea of having a spine cover that is solely comprised of the titles. I wanted the text of the spine to have the top and bottom fully reaching from one side to the other. I also played with the idea of creating a geometrically detailed frame or border with the food illustrations. I used the type face Avenir for the titles.
Mid Critique Feedback
The most common feedback I received from my peers was the off-putting color of the vegan book cover. The illustrations were generally liked however the spine design was also hard for people to read. I was also suggested a different typeface for the titles.
Individual Critique
Updates: Typeface of title, background colors of Ice Cream & Friends and Mighty Salads, signature of author on back, book information on front and back, publication Food52 logo on front.
For my individual critique, I got a lot of useful feedback that I followed through to my final design. These were some elements that needed improving on: background color for Mighty Salads, too many varieties of typefaces, general spine design, Food52 logo not necessary, making illustrations monotone within one cover design and some text lining issues.
Final Covers
For my final designs I opted for darker background colors because I felt that the food illustrations stood out better against a deeper color. I also changed the food icon colors quite drastically to give each cover its own color because previously Vegan and Mighty Salads looked quite similar. I played around with different typeface options for the titles but came to the conclusion that three different typefaces made the design seem a little chaotic and stuck to the typeface Arty Signature for the title and signature and Avenir for the spine and copy.
Conclusion
I really enjoyed this project because we had a lot more freedom in our designs, however I think that also made the project a lot harder because of the unlimited choices of typeface and color. I think the most difficult aspect of this project for me was color because I needed to have three colors that were not only suitable to each other but also needed to come across as an appealing color associated to food, also I realized the colors of the food illustrations changed drastically according to the background color.
