Roastpaper

A small project that looks at the food that people cook – and eat – with friends and family: the meals that are cooked without recipes, without cook books, from memory. This is not food for impressing; it is the everyday meals that we cook for the ones we love. A further aim of the project was to see how people record recipes. I had been thinking about family recipe books and scrapbooks and I was interested in how people might write down (or draw or photograph) the process of cooking a familiar meal.

I had some really nice contributions – all written, and generally using the traditional recipe format (title, ingredients list, method, yield etc). All of them were revealing about the writers in different ways and all are a pleasure to read. Interestingly, the contributions seemed to reveal the gender divide that exists in cooking: despite much coaxing of fellow students, colleagues and friends, the contributors were all female.

I initially collected all the contributions on a blog, www.roastpaper.blogspot.com. I'd forgotten about the texts until early on Saturday morning. I have collected them here as a modest A5 book, printed at home on different coloured papers and stapled; a small and final part of my MA major project hand-in.

Roastpaper

Roastpaper is looking for contributors for a new project that looks at how food fuels friendships and how eating together creates a sense of family: What’s your favourite recipe? Who are the friends you most like to share it with?

Send your most-used recipe – the one you can cook without even thinking about – breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner or supper; a list of your favourite dining companions; and a brief note explaining why eating with these friends is so special to roast@jamesbrook.net

thank you!

Lufthansa and Graphic Design

Deutsche Lufthansa is one of the most important airlines in the world, with a long and diverse history that goes back to 1926. The beginning of the 1960s saw one of the most important steps in the development of corporate communication. Lufthansa employed the designer Otl Aicher and his Gruppe E5 student group to develop a visual identity for for the airline. It was substantially realized in 1963 and up until the present day counts as one of the most groundbreaking corporate design solutions of the 20th century. With a focus on the famous brand identity, the design and advertising history of Deutsche Lufthansa from the 1920s to today is comprehensively documented here for the first time. This volume contains numerous illustrations from the corporate archive and background articles and interviews.

www.lars-mueller-publishers.com

Work

Cook Book Design Book

As a starting point for my major project I decided to make an extensive written analysis of existing cook books that explored how they function typographically and how they address users, readers and lifestyles. It was important for me to use writing as my methodology for this part of my research: I wanted to understand more clearly how typography works and how visual languages are constructed; I wanted to understand why I made design decisions and why I was drawn to certain types of design – and I wanted to be able to articulate these decisions more fluently and clearly. Writing and critical reflection is at the core of the LCC MA Graphic Design – and in the wider postgraduate community of the college – so developing a writing practice seemed a pertinent choice.

Freud's Weather - Sharon Kivland

Freud on Holiday. Appendix I. Freud’s Weather

Sharon Kivland

Edition of 300

Designed by James Brook

Published by information as material, York, 2011

ISBN 978-1-907468-09-4

20 pages

stapled

230 x 145 mm

Almost every year Sigmund Freud went on holiday, often accompanied by his brother Alexander, an expert on railway transport, timetables, and travel tariffs. He made a distinction between the holidays he spent with his family during the month of August and those voyages he took later, most often in September, with complicated itineraries. Freud prepared carefully for his trips, consulting tourist guides and other travel literature concerning the places he intended to visit attentively, especially those of the sites of classical antiquity, and of course, the famous Baedeker. The fifty-six letters and hundred and eighty-nine postcards of his travel correspondence with his family between 1895 and 1923 reveal his enjoyment of these holidays, his pleasure in his liberty, in getting a bargain, in the blue skies and the southern warmth, in the beauty of the landscape, in wine and food. From this correspondence descriptions of the weather have been collected.

Recipe Anatomy Newspaper

I had previously explored typographic hierarchies in recipes using the excellent chapter on ‘Expressing Hierarchy’ in John Kane’s A Type Primer. For this project, I generated many further iterations that explored the intricacies of typographic detail, turning the recipe inside out and pushing the recipe to the limits of comprehension; I published these iterations as this newspaper, Recipe Anatomy 2, and as a book, Recipe Anatomy.

The Manual

Visual research for my cook book aimed at an audience of men. I started to think about how most men like to collect things – stamps, records, CDs, trainers – and how many men like to order information – books, sheds, toolboxes etc. I started to focus my visual research on images that I though would reflect this: DIY manuals, car maintenance guides, diagrams, flowcharts and graphs. I collated this information together as a book, which I called The Manual that I used as the basis for the graphic language of my major project outcome.

Recipe Anatomy Book

I had previously explored typographic hierarchies in recipes using the excellent chapter on ‘Expressing Hierarchy’ in John Kane’s A Type Primer. For this project, I generated many further iterations that explored the intricacies of typographic detail, turning the recipe inside out and pushing the recipe to the limits of comprehension; I published these iterations as this book, Recipe Anatomy and as a newspaper, Recipe Anatomy 2.