Sustainability Cookbook Research​​​​​​​

This week I was able to head to a few bookstores in Brooklyn and do some research for my cookbook. I looked at many books for inspiration on layout, color, and image style, and illustration. For my book I'm hoping to draw on these inspirations to create something of my own. Below is an analysis of what I liked and didn't like of the books I saw.

"Dinner at the Long Table" by Andrew Tarlow & Anna Dunn had some really fun drawings and a strong color palette. While I wasn't overly enthusiastic about the actual imagery, I did really like these color block pages that broke up the recipes. The yellow and red I'm particularly drawn to and can see myself using a similar color palette for my own book.

"Dessert Person" by Claire Saffitz had some really fun typography and color blocking. I really liked the simplicity of first few pages with the text being weighted toward the corners of the pages and the different colored pages. I also thought it was smart how she used the purple color as a through line on many of her recipe pages. The imagery by Alex Lau was also incredible - he's always been an inspiration of mine.

I was obsessed with "Eating Out Loud" by Eden Grinshpan's imagery. Their use of warm colors and textures really spoke to me. I found myself enjoying the different tiles being used as backgrounds and the way in which their colors complimented the food on the plates. I also noted the use of parchment and baking paper adding an additional texture, and feel that would be fun to incorporate into my own imagery. I loved the way in which text was incorporated into some of the two page image spreads, as well as the way some of the recipes were sitting on top of photographs of neutral but textured photographs of surfaces. 

A lot of the books I was looking at had demonstration pages of images showing the step by step processes of the more complicated recipes. I would like to incorporate this in some of the recipes in my book.