Book Documentation

For this final project, we were to create a book (pages that are multiple of 4) of any size and of any content we chose. My initial thoughts when creating this book were of two things:

1. A cookbook of recipes that my friends all seem to enjoy
2. A book about the life of Junwoo, my friend who keeps me company in the class

I was dead set on the book of Junwoo and his mishaps of coming to class late. I even found some pictures of him that I was planning to use as the title page.

I had misplaced my sketchbook and had doodled some ideas about the plot of the short story on a spare piece of paper that I scavenged out of my bag. The plan for the story was an animated adventure of strange happenings that caused Junwoo to be late for CDF. These mishaps included alien abduction, caught in a bank robbery, and other strange events.

While drafting these ideas for the short story about him I quickly realized that I wanted to work on the cookbook. I am leaving school soon, and I wanted to give something back to my friends that had helped me through my time here at school.

Here, I tried to plan out my ideas for the cookbook layout.

Initial Sketches for Cookbook

As you can see, I was deadset on the title page. I wanted the cover page to be black and white, with a close picture of my cutting board and prepped food.

I had three different methods for utilizing both pages for the recipes. I wanted each 2 pages to be used for one recipe.

1. Image of the food on the left, with the recipe arranged in one giant column with subcolumns for each section of the recipe (steps, ingredients, etc)
2. The same image of the food on the left, and a 2 column layout on the right page. The steps would fill the right side column with all the other information on the left.
3. The last layout would include pictures of the food during each step of the cooking process. I really wanted to do this one, but with a concussion and a lot of makeup work, I didn’t have time to make the food until the night before the final book was due.

I ended up using design 2.

I had to them come up with recipes that would fulfil the multiple of 4 page criteria. In order to do that with a correct table of contents page, I needed 6 recipes. The six I chose were:

1. fish tacos
2. my version of a breakfast burrito with a korean twist
3. buddaejiggae (a korean stew)
4. chicken stew (a recipe my mom taught me)
5. italian pasta (that my dad taught me)
6. kimchi bokkumbap (kimchi fried rice)

All these were dishes I have cooked for my friends multiple times when they have come over, and all were unanimously agreed upon by them to include in the recipe book.

Again, with my concussion and work that I was allowed extra time on in other classes, I missed the few in-class crit sessions, but I did get decent feedback from Kaylee and Julia when I met with them during work days.

Here is my original picture that I took. I ended up editing it in illustrator and adding the title and author.

Next I planned all the text and layout for the recipe itself as follows with my second design.

Originally, I planned to use the white background and print it on parchment paper, or paper with the parchment texture. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any before my final printing so I had to manually add a parchment effect background. (It was a free texture download that I cannot seem to find the link to anymore).

Fast forward to 2 days before the final product is due. I finished all the layout work and all the paragraph styles in indesign. The only thing I had left to do was to actually cook all the dishes and measure all the ingredients as I cooked (I usually make these dishes without a given recipe, so I never knew how much of each ingredient I needed)

The next day, I spent 6–7 hours gathering all the ingredients, and cooking all 6 dishes. The following are the images taken by me during and after the dishes were completed:

Fish Taco:

Burrito:

Kimchi Bokkumbap:

Buddaejiggae:

Chicken Stew:

Pasta:

After inviting all my friends to eat all the food I made, I sat down around 2am to finish editing and recording the instructions for my recipe book. The following is my final recipe book. I don’t have images of the book after it was printed and bound at fedex kinkos, but the following images are screenshots from indesign of my final spreads

I am extremely proud of this recipe book, something that means a lot to me. These recipes have been changed, and reworked time and time again and I am happy to say that the dishes in this book reflect my best effort. I plan to write new personal end dedication pages to my close friends and print/bind them as gifts.

After the final crit, I went back and reviewed the comments on my book. Here are the comments broken down in pros and cons:

PROS:

Nice background

Consistent grids and layout

Nice cover photo and very good looking dishes

CONS:

Some pictures are a little hard to see

photos are sometimes different hard to see

cover photo is a little strange stylistically with the book itself

I also ended up catching some minor errors possibly due to me rushing it the night before. The main one is that I interchanged the word steps and directions for the recipes when I should’ve stuck with one. I caught this during the final crit. Overall, I think I performed well with the themes of hierarchy and grid. Color was a little hard to play with since I wanted that orangeish/brownish parchment paper. I was limited to using darker colors otherwise the wording wouldn’t have shown up. I am very proud of this book and I hope that to those people I give it to, it brings them happiness and a full stomach.