The Recipe Card Club
services branding, editorial, production management, web design, copywriting
designed at george brown college, thesisThe once commonplace practice of collecting and sharing recipe cards is on the brink of extinction. In a digital age, most turn to the internet or social media for recipe inspiration while recipe cards are ignored and forgotten about, along with the stories behind them and the people who wrote them. In order to aid this seemingly inevitable extinction, I sought o reframe recipe cards as engaging tools to look into the past and help facilitate connections with one’s family, friends and communities.
Enter the Recipe Card Club: an organization dedicated to reframing recipe cards as engaging lenses into the past. Geared toward nostalgic millennials but welcoming to all, The Recipe Card Club's publications and website help bring recipe cards into the 21st century.
Logos
The Recipe Card Club logo combines old-fashioned script type with a sleek, all-caps sans serif to visually demonstrate the intermingling of past, present and future.
Decorative and badge marks complement the primary logo to ensure The Recipe Card Club can be effectively represented at any size and in any application.
Visual Langauge
The Recipe Card Club uses three primary types of imagery: (1) Scanned images, including recipe cards and photographs; (2) Digital photography with either rounded corners to mimic the worn edges of recipe cards, or placed within a cameo; (3) Isolated images placed along vortex graphics to create a sense of floating in space.
The Recipe Card Club's typographic system is inspired by lettering typically found on recipe cards. Medusa is a stylized script typeface that mimics old-fashioned handwriting, Letter Gothic is an all-caps sans serif similar to those found on recipes clipped from food packaging, and Compagnon is a quirky typewriter-inspired typeface.
The colour palette is muted and pared back, inspired by colours regularly found on aged recipe cards and primitive computer hardware.
The Publication Series
The Recipe Card Club’s publication series consists of three volumes:
Interpreting the Recipe Card: Artifact, Connector, Conduit
An introduction to recipe cards as being meaningful objects and engaging tools through which we can connect with people we may or may not have known.
The Collection of Kathleen Givan
A case study of analysing and interacting with my own family's recipe cards as a means of connection.
The Collection of Grace Stofle-Cook
A case study of analysing and interacting with the recipe card collection of a woman I never knew, from another place and time.
Production
The printed books extend the brand’s visual language into the physical space with silver spot ink, fold-outs and linen paper. I bound them with silver thread on my mother’s sewing machine.
Website
The Recipe Card Club website is a prototype of a publicly available database of scanned recipe cards. Users would be able to upload their family recipes to preserve them digitally and inspire others to enjoy them as well.
