Project: Design a booklet based on the food and focus of my choice. It should be at least 8 pages long, not including the front and back covers.
Design process: To satisfy a persistent doughnut craving, I dove into Unsplash, Canva, and all the drool-worthy cooking blogs of the internet to source a ton of photos for inspiration. I knew I wanted some kind of neon sign for the cover, and I knew I nailed it when I found this one from Jack McDonald (Unsplash). It ended up inspiring the color palette for the whole booklet, and I built the rest through much iteration from there.
Result: An eye-catching booklet that worsened my craving for doughnuts and increased my appreciation for how they’re made.
Some building blocks
The hardest spreads to sort out were the ones in the middle—I had such a clear vision for the intro, recipes, and credits, but I had no idea how to design the pages on the types of doughnuts (“A Donut for Everyone”) and the pop culture and regional varieties (“Donut Culture” and “Around the World”).
The solution, I realized, was to edit the photos and text elements to make them my own. I removed the background of the jelly doughnut tower (by Sheri Silver via Unsplash) and added the splash of pink on page 5, and used Polaroid mockups created by Nathanael Aries to create an interesting layered effect on page 6. The circles on page 7 came out of messing around with the circles—I knew adding the yellow circle as a background would help, but it didn’t click until I warped the title of the section to match the shapes.
Final product
An ode to the doughnut, with all text written by me. You can download the PDF here!
