Designing Pass It On 🙌
Keryn and I first started talking about an amazing idea her and her mum wanted to bring to life back in 2018, over lunch at Old Quarter in Wellington. The idea was to create & design a book that would hold her family's most treasured recipes, enabling them to be passed down to family and friends for years to come.
Ideas and lunch in Lower Hutt
Over a delicious home cooked lunch, Keryn, Shobha and I discussed the book in more detail. We talked for hours, thinking about ideas and designs, determining how the book should look & feel. Slick and contemporary? Homemade and traditional? There were many different ways we could design the book, but by talking it through and working together we decided on a direction that everyone was excited about.
Finding inspiration
I didn’t know much about Indian culture when I agreed to help Keryn and Shobha on this project. Keryn and her family were amazing with helping answer any questions I had and helped direct me towards appropriate motifs and designs for inspiration. I built on this by looking at Indian textiles and ornamental patterns, also pictures of India and its vibrant culture. I discovered that India has a rich history of bright colours and decorative patterns, which were perfect for creating a distinct style for the recipe book.
Don’t judge a book by it’s cover, or maybe do
I began work on concepts for the book cover first, wanting to establish a strong look and feel which I could then roll out across the rest of the book. After a brainstorming session with Keryn & Shobha, we decided on three different cover ideas to explore. I went away and created some concepts for these three ideas, and after reviewing with Keryn & Shobha again, we decided on a design that depicted the hands of family members passing something to one another. This was the favoured design because it symbolised togetherness and the tradition of passing knowledge from one family member to another. We started by taking some quick photos which served as tests, to see if we preferred a photographic approach over an illustrated one.
Some of the initial concept ideas for the cover design.
Photoshoot
These tests were looking promising, so we decided on photography as the medium for the cover design. We brought in photographer Chris Burks to help us stage and shoot the photo we needed. Working together, we art directed Keryn & Shobha passing spices into each others hands, which were beautifully adorned with Henna. Chris was able to capture the spices tumbling and pouring from one set of hands to another, staged in front of a vivid pink backdrop.
Once we received the raw photographs from the shoot, I made selects of the ones I thought would work best. As it turns out the cover is actually two different images stitched together, as I preferred the top set of hands in one photo and the bottom set of hands from another. In this instance, it wasn’t too difficult to merge the two as the camera had been locked off, so there was almost no movement or lighting differences in the two photos. Adobe Photoshop was the perfect tool for this job, as it allowed me to blend the two images into one seamless cover photo.
If you want to learn more about how the book cover was designed, visit Keryn’s ‘Book Cover’ blog post.
Cover and spine design for Pass It On
Selecting typefaces
I then started to experiment with typefaces for the cover, knowing for well that whatever was chosen here would inform the typography throughout the rest of the book. I brought the cover into Adobe InDesign where I began to lay type over the top of the image, going back to reference my initial research as well as notes from when Keryn, Shobha and I defined the look & feel at the beginning of the project. We settled on a couple of complementary sans serif typefaces, which then meant I could start mocking up the spine and back cover.
The inside pages
This naturally lead onto coming up with some concepts for the inside pages of the book. Keryn & Shobha had some ideas for the recipe pages themselves, but mostly they left it up to me to define how the pages should look & feel. Keryn’s food photography takes centre stage with full bleed images of each delicious dish, with recipe names, methods and dietary requirements appearing on the adjacent page. Section pages add a pop of colour, each acquiring their colour from the images they sit next to. They also help serve as wayfinding, the colour of each small flower on individual recipe pages changes to match the colour of the section the recipe appears within.
The great layout
When we received the edited copy from the copywriter, I began to lay the document out in InDesign, applying the styles we had come up with in the concepting stage of the process. Naturally the designs developed and evolved as I started to work on areas of the book I hadn’t initially designed eg. group menu pages, breakout pages and pantry lists. Working closely alongside Keryn and Shobha, I was able to share designs and receive feedback quickly, which allowed us to iterate and change things on the fly. You would think doing all this from different sides of the globe would make more difficult, but having a 12 hour time difference has its advantages. I was able to make progress in my day here in the UK, share my work at night and receive feedback by the time I had woken up!
The proof is in the pudding
Once I had laid out the whole document and placed all of Keryn’s amazing images inside, I began to tweak the design of the book as a whole. Aligning styles and making sure everything was consistent. I sent the whole book back to Keryn & Shobha, who had the arduous task of checking all the layouts, to make sure they had come through correctly and were looking 💯.
In the meantime I also did some checks of my own, physically printing parts of the book out to check type sizes and colours. I even printed the whole book out (288 pages) at least twice, to check the consistency of everything. It’s so much easier to spot mistakes or misalignments when you take your work off the screen.
The finishing touches
Once the book came back from the proofreader, I made the final copy updates, added in the index (you have to do this last to ensure no page numbers have changed) and began to set up spot colours. We used a couple of Pantone colours, mainly to ensure the consistency of the main brand colours throughout the book. I chose the Pantone colours using a mix of Photoshop and physical Pantone colour books. We were also using gold foil on the cover, so we had to set up spot colours for these too.
After double and triple checking that the sizes of everything matched the specifications from the printers, I exported the book as a PDF and we sent it off. Keryn and Shobha did an amazing job checking the proofs that the printer sent from Hong Kong, and now the wait is on. I’m really looking forward to seeing the final printed and bound books! This was such an awesome experience and I would like to thank Keryn and Shobha for all their hard work and support. You both are truly amazing and I hope you have got as much out of this experience as I have ❤️
Jessica Read