I spent a lot of saturday looking through a stack of cookery books and scanning in pages that I liked or gave me some ideas that I could consider in my own book. I looked at a huge variety of books from the past 50 years and I think that this has helped me to understand how to meet my target audience and create something cheerful, positive and above all ethically driven.
I would like to use strict grids and type like some of the older books I have looked at however I think that this is a bit too traditional. I think that a change of colour or stock will enable me to use a functional gridded layout whilst keeping the design fun and green.
I have written some short annotations in amongst the huge amount of scans below.
A very old book in it's 40th edition currently, it has kept the same DL portrait format for years, this works well and keep all of the lists within tight columns and maximizes the small space.
A very old book with gorgeous serif typefaces however the layout of recipes could be improved greatly. I really like the graphic line drawings of utensils and machinery featured throughout the book.
This book is quite different to the other cookery books I looked at. It features mainly sans serif typefaces which are close to helvetica and works to a three column grid. This book is the first I have seen to be designed to be printed landscape and the pages flipped vertically. This works very well and is something I had already considered in order to make the most out of my small A6 single page format.
More linear illustrations (above and below)which I feel definitely bring personality to the book and seem to make the book more friendly. They look much better than photographs of the finished food and give the gridded text a much more organic shape to work around.
A very old Women's Institute Recipe Book that my auntie contributed to and kept many years ago.
Below is a larger format book on French Bistro cooking, they colours and images are very dated and the text layout isn't very inspiring however it seems to work on some level when printed large, nothing fancy, pure functionality.
Good introduction to equipment, I plan to have a small foraging equipment section in my book.
Simple vector illustrations make simple text layouts much more interesting, I think that collaborating with an illustrator will benefit my work greatly and enable me to produce this book much quicker and to a higher standard.
Step by step photographic images work well but I would like to stay away from photographs of the food and work mainly with text and illustration.
Decorative typographic titles and a simple image can be very good and simply conveying a lot of information. I would like to consider arranging my text and using a variety of weights of the same typeface however I have decided to work with one typeface throughout the book as it is such a small project. It is essential that my choice of typeface is appropriate for small print and includes a range of weights for titles and headings.
Arranging text around an image like this helps frame the food and bring focus to it whilst maintaining hierarchy within the type.
A great old book with some brilliant linear illustrations and classic serif typefaces.
I leaflet from Waitrose about the amount of food we waste and ways in which we can recycle food instead of binning it.
A brilliant Ray Mears book all about wild food! It's not much of a recipe book but has given me some good ideas of content for my booklet and has some beautiful photography with linear illustrations.
And lastly another book which gave me a lot of ideas of what to include in my book, Go Wild! This book has some great information and stories in it as well as instructions on survival techniques such as how to make a fishing rod and how to skin a rabbit.
