Cooking with Type
Grace Huang
Being blessed and having family members who love cooking, and enjoy cooking for others, I am well-fed and lack the ability to cook a proper meal. As a graphic designer, who deals with graphics and typography, I see a connection in designing and cooking: both involve a creative process that requires planning and iteration. Creating something requires gathering ingredients, either food or visual elements, and making choices during the process that eventually affect the end product.
Having realized that, I’ve decided to design while learning how to cook in a book dedicated to those home-cooked meals from home. The cooking process is visualized entirely with type, while the cooking utensils take the visual elements from brackets and parentheses. The book is divided into parts: a glossary for common cooking verbs, a list of utensils, and the actual recipes. Other than the conventional 2D pages, this book also contains pop-up sections, including a kitchen based on my real-life kitchen as well as some interactive installations encouraging viewers to interact.
By creating an immersive cooking and viewing experience, this project aims to challenge our assumptions about how text is usually perceived and asks us to reconsider our assumptions about how text conveys meaning. Through exploring different visual narratives created with type on paper, viewers take a step back and explore the connections between the functionality of type and ways of seeing in a new and creative way.