Every kid has some sort of dream that follows them around as they grow up.
Astronaut, veterinarian, butterfly fairy princess if you’re my sister.
For me, I wanted to be a chef.
I grew up watching the food network more than disney, and would sneak downstairs to watch iron chef at 10pm from the hallway behind the living room dreaming of the day I could wear the chefs jacket. I loved this dream so much that my 10th birthday party was a private chef teaching me and a couple friends how to cook korean food, I’d taken classes at PCC and Hot Stove Society (meeting tom douglas and marcus samuelson in the process too).
But as I got older it eventually turned into more of an avid hobby as I realized that the chef lifestyle isn’t for me, so I just consume food content from social media, and I sit in book stores leafing through all their cookbooks. But within the cooking process and the recipe creation stage, much like in design, i’m willing to push around pixels to achieve the perfect harmony.
So for that reason, my personal project would be to design and layout my own cookbook.
The bulk of the work is split into 3 parts :
Writing
Editing and auditing content (writing and/or recipe testing)
Designing (layout and photography)
Of these, writing will take up about a year. At least according to google the turnaround time for commercial cookbook writing is that short, but if im wanting to change the trajectory of cooking or something crazy like that i can spend a decade compiling and rewriting within my niche. But despite that, the goal is to gather your recipes and ideas and give them a structure and story. Almost every cookbook will have blurbs and excerpts explaining ingredients or stories about how certain dishes have impacted their life. Tone of the writing will also be dictated by your target audience. Which for me is my friends and family/people like my friends and family. I worry about a lot of their abilities to feed themselves.
For editing and designing, google is saying it’ll take another year. To check the writing, the recipes as well as photographing all the content, laying it out, and all those other flourishing touches before being sent off to print.
These are all assuming that you have an agent, an editor, and a photographer.
Of which I don’t necessarily have.
At all.
But that’s half the fun, no?
I’ve dabbled in writing and food photography and i’m heavy handed dabbling in design as a student at the moment, so all of this can be created
But this is a passion project, one that I’m not staking complete monetary gain in so I can chip away at little by little. Now that I think about it, it can be my prompt for next year’s personal project. I could enlist a new media student to help shoot if they want to build up their portfolio.
If i were to create this passion project over the course of second years, special interest class. It affords 3 quarters time to hammer out the work and have access to instructors to work out the finer details. In that time I’d need to do research on how to even write for a cookbook, find someone willing to help edit, enlist a new media student to help with photography, i could make illustrations for it as well. By the time I even getty to laying out my book i’d have taken jasons id class and had experience with jills magazine class. So i’ll be well versed in the programs needed. As far as pricing goes,
I have zero idea on how pricing would work as everything is relative to the final design, and all price estimate articles online are assuming its for absolute profit print and hands off publishing after the manuscript stage (which adds thousands to the final total)
$240 for adobe suite (that much is how much it costs within a year at student discount)
Im taking care of writing, design, layout
Possible hire/exchange with nm photographer
Printing will depends on the ratio of b&w : color pages, as well as binding.
but honestly I’m not looking to be releasing this all into the world, so I could find a small artist to bind my book, or try a single sample from a printer.