Thorn Malow and Anthony Galloway, lifestyle and travel influencers, have composed a series of nutrition-packed, whole food-based recipes to help people feel good about what they eat. From the start, we knew the final cookbook was going to be self-published so keeping costs low was important. This meant we were dependent on licensed free images and pictures taken from an iPhone. I thought it best to decide on available images first and then design from there. I ended up finding the cover image and other kitchen theme pictures with the same kind of light blue on Unsplash.com, and made sure to carry that light blue throughout the book. In a way, the overall concept for this cookbook felt apothecary-esque and the couple is known to be down to earth, so I made sure to make my typeface and color choices with this in mind.
After the visual style started to be conceived, it was about layout and integrating content. With any project, organizing information is important, but with cookbooks information needs to be organized in a way that creates clearly identifiable sections (ingredients, instructions, etc) that can be read and referred back to quickly. Leaving a liberal but balanced amount of whitespace is key and developing icons for each dietary preference helped too.
In most cookbooks the entree and side dishes are paired together in the same recipe, which sometimes makes it hard to refer to each side dish individually. So for Eating Clean I designed a recommendation section that refers to other complimentary recipes in the book. I think this works well from an organizational, functional, and business perspective (since the book ultimately promotes itself). I also made sure to include two different indexes at the end, one that focused on ingredients and the other focused on dietary preferences.
Cookbook Design
Eating Clean
Made Easy
