Last Wednesday was the half-way through the major project group crit. I prepared a screen presentation and took along the five projects that I have made so far: Ratatouille; Sunday Lunch; Sunday Roast; Sunday Lunch Extended Version; and How Did We Do? In the screen presentation I showed the projects that I have been working on: What to Cook and How to Eat and Roastpaper. I also talked about the unrealised projects that I have been thinking about: the scrapbook project and the visual recipe book that I mentioned in my previous post.
The presentation was a good opportunity to take a step back and to reflect on my project: what I've achieved; what I want to achieve; where I've been; and where I want to be. It was also an opportunity to think again about my research question:
How can typography reinforce the understanding of a text and amplify the authorial voice within it? Using recipe books as source material, this project will examine the ways that typography can be used to make a text comprehensible to the reader and how typography can be used to amplify the presence of the authorial voice.
The project has always had two strands: the use of typography (in particular, typographic hierarchy) as a way of ordering information in order to facilitate the understanding of a recipe (or, in a wider sense, a text); and the construction of the authorial voice through typography. Looking back on the work that I've done, I think the priorities in the question have changed: I am still interested in how a reader understands a text and how typography can facilitate that reading but, with the texts that I have written about cook books on cookbookdesign.blogspot.com I have become more interested in how the authorial voice is created through design - and, in particular through typography (within the context of cook books I am imagining the authorial voice as branding).
Paul's comments in the crit seemed to bear this out: he said that he thought my question had split into two projects: the first looks at the authorial voice, essentially how narrative is created through design; the second looks at cognition in typographic systems. Both Paul and Russ thought that I now need to re-think/re-focus/refine my research question. They advised me to go back to the work I have produced and see which ones are more successful, which ones work the best, and see how they can be developed further.
A criticism was that I have adopted a 'scattergun' approach, making work that is too disparate and lacking focus - paradoxically, there was also a comment that some of the work is saying the same thing in different ways. What I learned from Unit 2 is the importance - for me, anyway - of making physical things: that's how I learn and how I progress. That's why with Sunday Lunch, a project where I was exploring the notion of temporal space within the book format as a way of illustrating the timeframe of the recipe, I tried different formats, extending the project from a 48 page booklet to a 206 page hardback book - I needed to see how this would look so that I could then move on, arriving at the more modest 12 page newspaper.
On reflection, I can see that I may have lost sight of my original research question. The problem that I have been most interested in is how cook books have become about looking not cooking: I have been researching why people don't use cook books as instruction manuals but as a kind of escapism and, by extension, as signifiers of aspiration - cook books have replaced art books on the coffee table.
I have been really interested in how graphic design is complicit in this; my research into cook books has helped me understand how the brand (the authorial voice) is established in cook books through graphic design methods. I now feel I have more of an understanding of how typography creates meaning and, I think, can articulate more clearly how it achieves this. This was always one of my main aims of doing the MA.
I have also looked at how recipes are laid out with different kinds of typography: it's clear that some books are better laid out than others and that some recipes are easier to follow. John Kane, in his section on recipe hierarchies in A Type Primer was a good starting point for thinking about these hierarchies but, in the end, perhaps good typography only ever amplifies a Western left to right, downward reading of a text? Recipes are, of course, linear in nature: they have a beginning, a middle and an end and it would be disastrous (on the whole) for a cook to begin a recipe in the middle. So I wonder if there's any more to be said about this? What I've tried to do with the early books is to slow down the process, to take it away from the instant gratification of an image of a finished dish - I realise that what I have made would not work in the commercial world of cook book publishing but even so, these experimental layouts still work within the accepted conventions of Western reading.
The most successful project is also the most modest: Sunday Roast is a newspaper that extends the making of Sunday lunch over 12 pages, linking the instructions to a timetable that is divided into minutes. I think the project succeeds because it is anti-aspirational: the text-only newspaper format is the opposite of coffee table cook books that prioritise looking. The typography is considered, functional and good to look at but, the affordance of the newspaper format, means that it is not precious - readers can annotate it if they disagree with the recipe. In addition, the format has connotations of the Sunday newspapers and by extension, suggests the possibility of spending a leisurely three hours cooking lunch on a Sunday - one of my intentions had been to show that the process of cooking could be a pleasure in itself. As my best project, perhaps I should develop Sunday Roast further, see how I can make it work better.
However, the aims of Sunday Roast may be too far removed from my original research question. Paul suggested that I think more about how cooks actually use recipes as a way of developing the work further. With the Roastpaper project, I have asked people to send me their most-used recipes - the ones that they can cook without thinking about. One of my intentions was to look at the way people record recipes. I was interested in how individuals might write down a recipe, creating a hierarchy that might give me a clue as to how cooks use recipes. Interestingly, several of the respondents have remarked that they now have a new-found respect for recipe writers.
One thing that has been troubling me is the idea of taste: I am interested in particular typefaces and typographic styles, my preference tends to be for the rational and functional. Not everyone shares my taste so a problem that was identified in the crit was that the graphic language that I gravitate towards is not necessarily the best language available for a particular project. I need to think more about the relationship between the reader and the message and how narrative and the audience's values might become a reciprocal relationship: the design reflects the audiences values back at themselves.
I have been thinking, over the weekend, that a possible line of enquiry for exploring how design can reflect an audience's values could be to concentrate on a particular audience. Someone pointed out to me a recently published cook book, aimed at men: Eat Like a Man: The Only Cookbook a Man Will Ever Need. It made me think about whether there is actually a gender divide in the kitchen and whether there is any mileage in designing a book that reflects the values of a target audience of men? When I was writing about cook books, one of the most unexpectedly interesting books that I looked at was Something for the Weekend by Simon Rimmer and Tim Lovejoy: this is not a book I would have chosen myself, it was given as a present and I have never cooked from it. It was interesting to unpick what was going on in the design of the book; how the choice of colour, typeface etc, created connotations of blokey masculinity that was miles away from the sensitivities of Nigel Slater and the effusiveness of Nigella Lawson. After analysing this book I did not like the design any better - but I did understand why I didn't like it and had a respect for the designer who had very cleverly targeted a particular audience.
Paul suggested some references for further reading: I'm familiar with the work of Jake Tilson (and his father Joe Tilson) but I'd forgotten about his cook books. A Tale of 12 Kitchens, Jake Tilson's cook book that follows his family through four countries, documenting the food that they eat, will be useful to look at, especially in relation to the idea of collage in the scrapbook project. I'm not familiar with Martí Guixé - though I probably should be - luckily he has an extensive website and his book, Food Designing, is available on Amazon. Len Deighton's Où est le Garlic? has been mentioned before - and by several people - so I think I should track down a copy. Interestingly, given my thoughts on cook books aimed at men, Ou est le Garlic? was repackaged, in 2010, as French Cooking For Men - but then Deighton's books were all aimed at men anyway.
However, the aims of Sunday Roast may be too far removed from my original research question. Paul suggested that I think more about how cooks actually use recipes as a way of developing the work further. With the Roastpaper project, I have asked people to send me their most-used recipes - the ones that they can cook without thinking about. One of my intentions was to look at the way people record recipes. I was interested in how individuals might write down a recipe, creating a hierarchy that might give me a clue as to how cooks use recipes. Interestingly, several of the respondents have remarked that they now have a new-found respect for recipe writers.
One thing that has been troubling me is the idea of taste: I am interested in particular typefaces and typographic styles, my preference tends to be for the rational and functional. Not everyone shares my taste so a problem that was identified in the crit was that the graphic language that I gravitate towards is not necessarily the best language available for a particular project. I need to think more about the relationship between the reader and the message and how narrative and the audience's values might become a reciprocal relationship: the design reflects the audiences values back at themselves.
I have been thinking, over the weekend, that a possible line of enquiry for exploring how design can reflect an audience's values could be to concentrate on a particular audience. Someone pointed out to me a recently published cook book, aimed at men: Eat Like a Man: The Only Cookbook a Man Will Ever Need. It made me think about whether there is actually a gender divide in the kitchen and whether there is any mileage in designing a book that reflects the values of a target audience of men? When I was writing about cook books, one of the most unexpectedly interesting books that I looked at was Something for the Weekend by Simon Rimmer and Tim Lovejoy: this is not a book I would have chosen myself, it was given as a present and I have never cooked from it. It was interesting to unpick what was going on in the design of the book; how the choice of colour, typeface etc, created connotations of blokey masculinity that was miles away from the sensitivities of Nigel Slater and the effusiveness of Nigella Lawson. After analysing this book I did not like the design any better - but I did understand why I didn't like it and had a respect for the designer who had very cleverly targeted a particular audience.
Paul suggested some references for further reading: I'm familiar with the work of Jake Tilson (and his father Joe Tilson) but I'd forgotten about his cook books. A Tale of 12 Kitchens, Jake Tilson's cook book that follows his family through four countries, documenting the food that they eat, will be useful to look at, especially in relation to the idea of collage in the scrapbook project. I'm not familiar with Martí Guixé - though I probably should be - luckily he has an extensive website and his book, Food Designing, is available on Amazon. Len Deighton's Où est le Garlic? has been mentioned before - and by several people - so I think I should track down a copy. Interestingly, given my thoughts on cook books aimed at men, Ou est le Garlic? was repackaged, in 2010, as French Cooking For Men - but then Deighton's books were all aimed at men anyway.
