Art Direction, Cover & Interior Layout Design · Personal Project, 2024
Two cookbooks, one for each side of the family. An exploration of heritage through family recipes and traditions.
Developed for the Typography workshop during an Erasmus exchange in Krakow, Poland.
My dad is Chilean: rich, savory cooking, warm deep tones anchored in dark red, serif typography. My mom is Finn-Swedish: lighter recipes, sweets and cakes, a pale and airy palette with light blue as the counterpoint, sans-serif.
The source material consists of anything my parents could find around the home: handwritten recipes passed between friends and relatives, scanned postcards, letters, photographs from different decades, newspaper clippings about family members.
Nothing was cleaned up or elevated beyond what it was. Rather, the challenge was to hold all this material together in a way that felt organized, giving each clipping its space, while keeping the original raw quality.
Each recipe spread sets the original handwritten note next to a typeset version, preserving the voice of whoever wrote the original while keeping a cleaner, more readable alternative available.
The photography was shot in the same domestic, unglamorous register as the scanned material: ingredients on a cutting board, dough being rolled out.
The books are meant to feel like opening a forgotten cupboard and finding a box of photos, postcards, and notes. The typography is minimal and functional so it does not compete with that material.
The books were printed and bound at Cyfra 7, a specialist print shop in Krakow, where the stitching was left exposed on the spine. The cover can be detached from the pages entirely, revealing a larger photograph underneath.
