"3 Modern Takes on Matzah" Non-Traditional Story

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"3 Modern Takes on Matzah" spread revised by Samuel Park for his portfolio.

This project was a group project for our Media Design class at the Medill School of Journalism. I collaborated with Ilana Solomons on the nontraditional story on religion. Solomons suggested we cover recipes using matzah since she was fasting for Passover.

The original, collaborative spread is included after the design philosophy for comparison with my revised version.

Audience

Our audience is the non-traditional millennial. They cook casually and don’t stress over ingredient measurements or instructions. They also don’t want to sacrifice variety of food just because it’s Passover. This is why we chose to feature multiple recipes on the page, and not a lengthy recipe for one food item. We believe our reader would be like the Delish reader, so we added D-Lish to our folio to indicate this.

Challenges

We started off with the voice and look of Buzzfeed Tasty. It was very difficult to gather information on their actual voice and look because most of their posts linked out to other publications. They also did not have a print magazine, which complicated our efforts to take on their tone. Moving paper to the web is hard, and so is moving web to paper. Instead, we moved to the style of a print publication like Delish.

Process

My partner chose the recipes we covered by their colors. Once she made the foods, I took original photos of food, and developed them using Lightroom. I then cropped them out to their exact shapes on Photoshop.

We then laid out the photos on InDesign according to our sketches. The goal was to feature triangles that would balance each other across the spread. The triangles would also direct eyes toward the s’mores.

The text was difficult to lay out on its own. To give the text its own shape, we placed them inside bright-blue circles. This served to draw eyes to the text as well as the colorful photos. We gave the ingredient text a slight slant to complement the lines of the food. The uneven shape of the s’more made it difficult to slant our text, but we solved the problem by making the s’more bigger.

My Edits

I revised the sizing of the summary text and the number of fonts used in the header.

Our original font for matzah was very decorative. This made selection and layout very difficult. Many of the fonts we chose clashed with our main title font.

Also, many people said that they couldn't read the word, especially if they were not familiar with Passover. I changed the font to increase legibility for this audience.

By making these changes, I increased the amount of white space on the page, and made the design more minimal.

The original spread is included below for comparison.