From Pixels to Plate
A publishing company created a cookbook centered on dishes being translated from their video game to real life recipes.
Phase 1
The first round of design was a lot of research like: finding three recipes to use, creating a mood board that contained the imagery & formatting I wanted to emulate, creating two possible covers, and experimenting with three different types of recipe layouts. The second round was a lot of experimentation and exploration with type and imagery, such as: Chapter quotes having a much smaller font size while the titles were expanded to fit the spread better and the image of the dish on the left side is the in-game example and scene.
Phase 2
The light blue and dark blue from the inside covers and yellow from the cover are used to highlight the games on the bottom of each spread, while the colors of each chapter from the Table of Contents are used for the Headlines. The “Easter Egg” for each game no longer has a white box behind it, but placed strategically on the images for the best clarity. The quantities of ingredients were bolded to both grab the viewer’s eyes better and to separate the items in a way that wouldn’t disrupt the formatting.
Final Phase
I recently participated in The Mix event hosted by the AIGA Portland Chapter, an online call for both student designers and recent graduates to show their portfolio to two experienced professionals in the field. With fresh eyes provided by Lindsay Johnson of Wieden & Kennedy and Freelancer Nathan Gruppman along with host Angela Espersen, I garnered valuable insight for this project. With those insights, “From Pixels to Plate” went from just a student layout design project to a cookbook full of passion, creativity, and practicality.
Credit
While real recipes were not necessarily required for this project, I went online and searched for real video game based recipes. I designed the pages to maintain an actual cookbook format, but I could not do these recipes so I could cook them later thanks to Pixelated Provisions, a video game food blog made by Victoria Rosenthal who has several published cookbooks under her name.