JBU Honors Program T-Shirt Design
I designed two T-shirt designs for a local farmer's market, created for the purpose of screenprinting with no more than three colors.
The "New Cook Book": Interior & Exterior Redesign
PERSONAL PROJECT FOR SCHOOL ASSIGNMENT
This project was completed for my Advanced Design class during my junior year, wherein we had to design a book jacket - including spine and flaps, end pages, and a few sample pages of typesetting for a book of our choosing. Our professor encouraged us to consider unique publications such as cookbooks, which immediately motivated me to choose Better Homes and Gardens' New Cook Book, something that was a staple in my mom's kitchen, and that I'm sure is popular among many other households as well. The original cover is pictured below.
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I was drawn to typesetting something with the potential for columns, lots of subheads, and lists because of the challenge. While I had done minimal typesetting for posters, more traditional books, and even a page of Scripture, I was intrigued by the possibility of incorporating not only a unique form of typesetting, but imagery as well.
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The 17th edition of this cookbook is packed with quirky fonts and beautiful photography, something that would be hard to compete with, so I decided to head in the direction of "simpler is better." If this is a cookbook to be picked up and used by anyone, since it is full of basic recipes, I figured that it should be readable by anyone and not overwhelming.
Exterior Artwork & Layout
I developed three rough sketches to begin conceptualizing the front cover, which would be illustrations that would carry over to the entire jacket. The design of the original New Cook Book is highly distinct, featuring a unique red checked pattern across all of its many editions. This was not something I wanted to lose when I considered all of my possible design choices, but I wanted to refresh it since I found the original jacket to be a bit drab.
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My first sketch was a heart-warming scene with a mother and son in a kitchen. I wanted to place the plaid pattern on the tablecloth of the surface upon which they were cooking. This made the overall feel of the design lean a bit more into a children's illustrated book, which was not necessarily something that I wanted.
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My second illustration featured a variety of foods scattered across a background that I wanted to make the red checkered pattern. This one felt the most achievable, even though I wanted to exercise my illustration skills with the first design.
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My third sketch leaned more heavily into hand-lettering, which would make the name of the book far more attractive to look at and still preserve the distinct pattern of the original design. As hand-letting is not my specialty, I felt like this design wouldn't be a strong outcome, so I instead focused all my efforts on the second sketch as this seemed to nail the right vibe I wanted while still communicating my illustration skills.
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I began by scanning my pencil sketch and importing it into Photoshop, where I outlined everything and filled it with color, lighting, shading, and texture. I placed everything on a hand-drawn red checked pattern that required blending modes and textures to get relatively close to the original design, while not exact. I made room for the typography, using a font that I matched to the original logo, which I then incorporated throughout the rest of the inner pages.
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I experimented quite a bit with text layout for the back cover and the inner flaps, as I struggled to highlight the text without distracting from the illustration, and finally landed on a low-opacity white block to set everything apart.
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Developing Type Systems
I appreciated this project because it refreshed my knowledge of typography and typesetting. Each page was so densely packed with text that it was very difficult to strip away its formatting and find something sleek that fit on the dimensions I had picked.
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Our professor encouraged us to find and utilize a consistent typographic system, whether that be to use numbers following the Golden Ratio, the system of font sizes generated by programs like Microsoft Word of Google Docs, or something else entirely, as long as it was intentional and consistent. I struggled the most with this, as it was hard to find something that was simple, left room for illustrations, and fit all the words it needed. I generated three systems, working with a combination of serif and sans serif fonts to achieve a classy yet readable feel, particularly considering the fact that lots of numbers and fractions would need to be clear with whatever font I chose.
Creating Illustrations & Putting It All Together
I ultimately landed on combining two typographic layouts that featured clear, contrasting fonts that suited the front cover design well as well as a concise, sturdy block of text that was readable but not too spread out. This left plenty of room at the top of the page to include an illustration, done in the same style as the jacket cover. By some miracle I was able to incorporate all the text featured on the original pages, and I sampled a few different sections of the cookbook rather than the first few chronological pages to demonstrate how the layout would work with different kinds of paragraphs, instructions, and lists.
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After putting together simple end page and title page designs, I really like how the end result turned out. The illustrations were fun to tackle and ended up working well for the simplistic, easier-to-read, and quaint style I wanted. The typesetting was a good refresher for my knowledge of typography, and I am overall pleased with this project. I would love to tackle a long-term illustration project like this in the future.
