Savor the Moment:

A Traditional Cook Book

Book Layout Design, 2025.

This project was based on the prompt to design a cook book, which I had never attempted previously. This was a university project where I was granted full creative freedom to create any type of cook book I wanted including atypical, hypothetical cookbooks using inedible material. I decided to challenge myself by creating what is essentially a prop book for a fictional murder story where a grandmother loses her sanity and cannibalizes her local mailman. Within the story, the book itself is both the main evidence to her crimes, revealed through reading notes left within the book’s pages, and the murder weapon itself, where the grandmother has altered the recipes to meet her new ingredient preferences. 

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I based the design of the book off of the cookbook of my very own grandmother, who has had her copy of Better Home and Gardens for over 30 years. To emulate the feeling of the booking being a worn and well-used item, I created several stained and yellowed paper textures to create the book’s aged appearance. I took great inspiration from the layout and font choices made in the original Better Home and Gardens cook book, focusing on using large images to counter balance the smaller and organized typography style. Finally, for an extra fun and slightly disturbing twist, I asked my grandmother to handwrite all organic papers and elements that are scattered throughout the pages, later scanning them in to create a cluttered effect similar to her inspirational cook book.