Vintage Cookbook, Modern Tools
Design Challenge
My first project collaborating with Artificial Intelligence engines, I was tasked with creating a vintage style cookbook using modern tools with the help of AI. We were required to use Chat GPT to come up with at least two recipes and had the option of utilizing Adobe Firefly (still in Beta at the time) to generate recipe images. While only needing two recipes and four total pages, including cover and back, my final project included eight recipes, a content page, and a cover that resulted in a 20-page booklet.
Process
I was inspired as a big moviegoer to have recipes inspired by some of my favorite movies from over the course of the last 60 years. I spent time writing and then refining my Chat GPT prompts to give me recipes of specific types that I was excited to display. I took my learned knowledge of how to give AI engines specific prompts for specific results into Adobe Firefly where I received all of the recipe photos I used–aside from the Lembas Bread recipe photo. Keeping an intro prompt of “70’s style, photograph, recipe photo,” and then adding the specifics of the recipe made photo generation go much faster.
Additionally, I comprised a moodboard of the movies that inspired my cookbook.
Struggles & Takeaways
During the design and organization, I focused on type setting in a grid style, which seemed to be the focus on the 70’s cookbooks I was inspired by. I designed a few organizations of the recipes, focusing on hierarchy of information through varying fonts within the same family and sizing. Additionally, I wanted to include small quotes from the movies I chose to design based on, with important aspects being highlighted by different colored text.
In addition to the general design, I printed out and assembled a physical mockup to pass out during presentations–which was not required. I have plans to try and make the AI generated recipes and see how good they are!
