Easy Cookbooks

Editorial Design

A three-part cookbook series, balancing clarity, tactility, and visual engagement, designed to support and enhance the cooking experience.

A stack of three hardcover cookbooks. The top book, Easy Sea Cookbook, is fully visible, showcasing a design that merges clean typography with striking food imagery. A photograph of a pile of fresh clams is placed over the two ‘Os’ in "Book," visually interacting with the text.

Intro / The Brief

Distinguished by their culinary topics, Easy Cookbooks is a three-part editorial project developed in collaboration with a chef, aimed at making home cooking accessible, engaging, and enjoyable. Each book (Easy Sea, Easy Meat, and Easy Vegan) focuses on a specific theme while sharing a unified design language.

The goal was to develop an editorial system that would support clear recipe delivery and intuitive navigation, while offering a tactile presence that readers could connect with.

An open spread from the Easy Sea Cookbook. The left-hand page features a plated dish with scallops, vegetables, and sauce, while the right-hand page presents the recipe layout with elegant typography, and numbered steps for easy readability.
Easy Vegan and Easy Sea cookbooks on display shelves.

My Role

Working closely with the chef, I developed the editorial direction and design of the series — from cover design and layout to typographic approach and visual tone.

My role included the full development of the books’ visual identity across the volumes. This involved designing bold, visually dynamic covers, building flexible interior layouts, and selecting colour palettes and typographic systems that responded to each cookbook’s individual theme — while still aligning as a cohesive series.

The Easy Meat Cookbook is shown laid open upside-down, revealing both the front and back cover. On the front cover, large modern typography displays the title, with a fresh cut of raw meat placed over a portion of the word "Cookbook", with the edges of the meat wrap around the thin outer lines of the two ‘Os’ in "Book".
A step-by-step instructional spread from the Easy Meat Cookbook. The left-hand page features a close-up of a breaded dish, while the right-hand page shows a lis and pictures of ingredients.

Concept / Strategy

The design focuses on clarity, usability, and visual engagement — making the cookbooks not only tools but companions in the kitchen — reinforcing the connection between the tactile nature of cooking and the printed pages.

Creating a unified design system, introducing variety while maintaining a consistent visual theme throughout the volumes.

Approach

  • Visual Consistency: Each book adopts its own colour scheme and ingredient-focused imagery, with all three designed to tie together through type, structure, and layout — creating distinctive volumes while maintaining a recognisable series that reads as a single family.

  • Engaging Cover Design: Featuring imagery chosen to reflect each culinary theme, the covers combine bold, large-scale typography with carefully selected high-quality food photography, where imagery interacts directly with the text to create a tactile and engaging connection between the books and the cooking experience.

  • Structured Pages Layout: Recipes are structured within a clean, simple, modular grid system, with numbered steps and sections guiding the reader through the cooking process. Focusing on usability, engaging elements are implemented to echo the covers’ design concept — with layered images, compositions, and accented visual elements — designed to further reflect the hands-on nature of cooking, creating engagement within the page while maintaining instructional clarity.

The inner cover endpaper of the Easy Vegan Cookbook features a green background with hand-drawn white illustrations of fruits and vegetables, such as mushrooms, strawberries, artichokes, onion, etc.
An open spread from the Easy Vegan Cookbook The left-hand page features a full-page photograph of a vegetable-based dish, while the right-hand page presents the recipe with structured typography, green accents, and numbered steps for easy readability.

With multiple recipes and culinary themes, the challenge was to balance consistency with variety — creating a steady page rhythm across the volumes that made the books feel like part of the same family, yet distinct in their own right.

Each cover features playful integration between photography and typography — a red pepper curling into the type on Easy Vegan, fresh clams sitting directly on the page of Easy Sea, and a fresh cut nestling snugly into the letterforms of Easy Meat. Endpapers introduce the content through hand-drawn illustrations of ingredients, using these elements not just for decoration, but to open the pages with a sense of craft and creativity. The inner layouts pair full-bleed food photography with structured sections and numbered steps, allowing visual and instructional content to work together in a seamless, intuitive rhythm.

A hardcover cookbook with a green and white cover design, titled Easy Vegan Cookbook. It features red pepper placed on top of the large text 'Cook Book', with its stem curving into one of the ‘Os’ in "Cook," subtly interacting with the typography.

As companions in the kitchen, each volume invites readers into a practical and engaging experience — with collections of recipes aiming to enhance the process of cooking without overwhelming it.

Bold covers, ingredient-driven imagery, and intuitive, structured layouts are designed to work together to make cooking experiences accessible to all levels — guiding home cooks through clear, visually engaging steps that support confidence, creativity, and ease in the kitchen.