The Heart of Food is a plant-based cookbook centered around using food as a means of preventing and treating illnesses.
Objective: complete a capstone project centered around a passion
Roles: writer, photographer, researcher, illustrator and designer
Tools: Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop, Procreate
Ideation & Research
I researched a variety of cookbook cover pages and layouts in order to get a feel for different styles and distinguish my cookbook from others. I chose to go in a different avenue from your regular cookbook and have the feel for The Heart of Food be mellow and centered in Eastern design and knowledge. As a nutrition student and plant-based eater of several years, I have done a lot of research about this diet that I have pulled for this book. Additionally, I consulted with nutrition professor, Dr. Raj, for further information and to fact check my work.
Colors & Layout
The message I wanted to communicate through-out this book was that food can be healing and a wonderful means for preventing illnesses. I communicated this message in a simple, minimalistic way by creating a layout with adequate empty space and keeping the color palette muted and earthy to invoke a sense of peacefulness. These decisions also keep the reader grounded as they experience the book, which allows the reader to better absorb the information present.
Recipes & Photography
These recipes come purely from the heart. These recipes are what I have put together after being a plant-based eater and nutrition freak for many years. After doing further nutritional research on all of my favorite recipes, I chose the best few that would nutritionally benefit a person seeking a plant-based diet for the first time. When deciding on the final recipes, it came down to ensuring that all recipes are simple and cheap to make. I photographed the completion of each recipe and edited them only slightly on Adobe Photoshop to preserve the authenticity of the meal.
Cover Ideations
After researching cookbook covers, I decided I did not want to have a traditional image of food for the cover of this book and instead have a figure that represents what this book means. I inspired my cover off of mandalas which are figures representing the universe in Hinduism and Buddhism. Mandalas can be used as an aid in meditation, and the goal of this book is not only to show readers how food can be used to heal, but also to illustrate how eating a meal can be a form of living meditation. I went through several different sketches and mood boards before deciding on a cover that adequately matched the feel of the book.
Early sketches of final cover
Challenges
Completing a project that combined my two passions (design and nutrition) was fun and exciting, but also came with certain challenges. There was so much information that I wanted to share in this book, so I had to determine what parts of knowledge I wanted to add and what parts should be left out. I did not want to overwhelm the readers, so I kept my design rather minimalistic with some white space still left on each page to keep the information digestible. I boiled down my ideas by writing everything out, weighing the pros and cons of keeping each piece of information, and keeping only the what was necessary to properly get my vision across.