Don't Panic Idea Development & Research

When I was first thinking of ideas I thought of a quote from Edmund Burke, an Anglo-Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher. "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

This led me to develop my ideas and consider points in time where one man has done something great that has inspired others and really made a big difference. I had considered cultural movements such as punk however I wanted to stay away from that and base the roots of my idea in something political. I instantly thought of the famous Tank Man in the Tiananmen Square Protests and the image that caught one small man standing in front of a row of giant tanks. I loved the idea of using scale or colour like this to show some sort of emphasis on size and overall impact of the individual.

Researching Wild Food, Foraging & Recipes

I only intend to include a small selection of recipes in my booklet, it is a starting point for anyone interested in foraging for food. It will explain the basics and give you a few ideas of how to get started.

I have done a lot of research these past few days and found some good sources for information and recipes for my book...

BBC Food site with lots of good general info and a few good recipes from famous TV chefs.

Virtual Italia has a very good article about foraging food and where foraging originated and how it has developed. Not to mention a couple of good recipe ideas.

Interesting article from the Telegraph website...

"The nettles I thought I’d dug out last summer are back, their hairy white roots snaking sideways just beneath the surface of the soil, and there’s a froth of lime green chick weed in the borders. Never mind, I think, taking down my well-thumbed copy of Richard Mabey’s Food for Free (Collins £12.99): if you can’t beat them, eat them.
Foraged food has become fashionable, with top London restaurants employing professional foragers to supply them with ''wild greens’’, samphire and mushrooms. But why venture so far as a country lane when equally good ingredients are just outside your back door? Weeds are the ultimate credit-crunch ingredient: abundant, involving little work other than weeding that one would do anyway, and free. They’re also incredibly nutritious: according to the tables in the excellent Cooking Weeds by Vivien Weise (Prospect Books £9.99) they have many times the minerals, vitamins and protein of cultivated vegetables – compare 333mg vitamin C in 100g stinging nettles with 13mg in an equal amount of lettuce, and 8.4mg iron in 100g chickweed with just 4.1mg in spinach."

A website full of dandelion recipes.

Wildman Steve Brill's website is a great resource and holds a lot of information and recipes which I plan to use in my book.

A good Elderflower cordial recipe from the BBC and here's a Pine Needle Tea recipe from eHow.







The picture you have been seeing have been of some Garlic Mustard Pesto from Straight from the Farm's website and looks ridiculously tasty and brightens up this boring post.

Recipe Book Research

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.