The Spice of Local Life Cookbook

A cookbook inspired by my favorite meals from my backpacking trip around the world.

PROJECT SUMMARY

After a year of backpacking around the world in 2019, my partner and I amassed a long list of meals we wished we could eat again.

So I decided to make a cookbook of our own so we could continue to eat our favorite meals for forever.

This project took me a little over 8 months and was designed in InDesign.

RESEARCH

I started off with a list of the meals we liked best and then began to research online to see if there were any recipes that seemed to align with what I remembered those dishes tasting like.

Unsurprisingly, there weren’t any that were perfect, so I spent a lot of time comparing recipes, taking notes on ingredients and methods that seemed accurate, and making my best guesses to fill in the gaps.

Then I spent even more time cooking the recipes and making adjustments to get it just right - big thanks to my partner for taste testing and sous chefing a hundred and one times.

When it came to identifying the key features for the cookbook itself, I took two approaches:

I reviewed a variety of cookbooks of our own, noting the features I appreciated as a user, like:

  • high-quality photos

  • brief descriptions of the recipe

  • clearly separate lists of ingredients vs. steps

I also browsed through reviews of cookbooks online to identify features other users cared about, like:

  • keeping recipes grouped by course

  • an accurate and complete table of contents

  • including more detail vs. less.

DESIGN

Once I had a general idea of the features and a few mockups of designs on paper, I used InDesign to create the digital layout and imported photos from our travels (and a few from my own recipe testing at home).

I wanted the high-quality images to be the main visual draw, so I kept the rest of the design clean and simple, just adding a little bit of green and brown to add color and hierarchy.

USER TESTING & REFINING

I printed ~20 copies to share with friends and family for additional testing of the recipes and the usability of the design itself.

After about a month, I collected all of the feedback and used affinity mapping to identify the most common/significant issues experienced. I then made a second version of the cookbook, making adjustments to solve for those key issues, like:

  • Updating the list of ingredients to be listed in order of use

  • Adding vegetarian substitutions for inclusivity whenever possible

  • Including serving sizes

  • Changing the text from brown to black for increased contrast and accessibility

TAKEAWAYS & NEXT STEPS

This project was a HUGE undertaking that was much more time-intensive than I ever anticipated, especially since it was a side project that I could only work on outside of my normal day job. I learned a lot about the importance of maintaining consistency and attention to detail. In retrospect, I wish that I had users test out the recipes and layout before I compiled them into my digital design in InDesign. Making adjustments to the recipes afterward was much more difficult as many of the adjustments required significant updates to the layout.

The final design will soon hit Amazon’s online marketplace for public purchases! Those who helped test the original version received advance copies of the final version and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

Thanks for checking out this project! I hope it inspired you to travel somewhere new (or to at least eat something yummy)!

Here are some other projects you might like:

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