你吃了吗 / Have You Eaten Yet?
For my degree project at the Rhode Island School of Design BFA Graphic Design, I focused on the practice of relearning and reclaiming my Chinese heritage as well as the narrative of the Asian-American experience. Specifically, I designed a project about food as a medium of cultural literacy (though we are far from our homelands, we draw closer to our cultural identities through cooking, eating, and sharing meals). The project is two-fold:
Part I: Cookbook
Part II: Comfort Food Quilt
Abstract
Degree Project Trailer Video
I created this video as part of DP requirements at RISD; it sums up the narrative of my degree project and the process of its creation!
Part I: Cookbook
Of course, in any project pertaining to food, the most reasonable deliverable to create is a cookbook. Thus, I wanted to design an introductory cookbook dedicated to other Asian-Americans going through the same things I had experienced. For this book I chose 9 recipes starting from easy, and each more challenging than the previous.
The book is coptic stitched and printed on glossy bristol vellum.
Endpages design
Recipe 1: Stirfried Tomato Egg
Recipe 2: Stirfried Cabbage
Recipe 3: Egg Drop Soup
Recipe 4: Ginger Scallion Hokkien Noodles
Recipe 5: Red Braised Pork Belly
Recipe 6: Scallion Pancakes
Recipe 7: Spiced Braised Beef Shank
Recipe 8: Pork & Chive Dumplings
Recipe 9: Spicy Sichuan Hot Pot
Chinese Ingredient Glossary
Because this is an introduction to Chinese cuisine, I wanted to help the reader in identifying unfamiliar ingredients and be able to look for them in markets. It's also helpful in learning Chinese terms and applying them in real life! Each ingredient is accompanied by an illustration, name, Chinese translation and pinyin pronunciation, as well as a short description. Each recipe's list of ingredients has a few notated with a red circle, which refers to this glossary.
Illustrations
I created each recipe illustration using Procreate on my iPad Pro.
Part II: Comfort Food Quilt
As a second component partnered with the cookbook, I decided to create a quilt that serves as a literal metaphor for the term "comfort food" and how it can keep you warm and make you feel safe.
Part II: Comfort Food Quilt
My day-of presentation was set up in the Graphic Design commons. I set up a cozy corner with rugs, a coffee table, and a TV to present my keynote. I printed and bound 4 copies of my cookbook, laid my quilt on a pedestal, and cooked 4 out of the 9 recipes detailed in my book. Lastly, I had a tablecloth printed with the recipe icons I designed.
Process: Cookbook
For the cookbook, I wasn't sure at first what style and feel I was aiming for with the design. These are some aimless first tries - projects always start somewhere.
I took inspiration from illustrations I found online. In addition, I was contemplating the "self-care" and healing aspect of the cooking and learning process, and was inspired by Asian medicinal packaging; that jade green and compartmental style became an important aspect of my project.
This is an example of one of my Procreate illustrations; all 9 were recorded and drawn the same way.
For each recipe, I wanted to create an IKEA manual to follow graphically. I noticed there was a design flaw in most cookbooks. There is a block in the flow of doing something physically and not seeing it visually, but instead reading about it. For example, the ingredients list may read, "1/4 tsp salt". You flip to the next page to see the steps of the recipe, and step 2 says, "add the salt to the bowl." Wait, how much salt was it again? You flip the pages back and forth and continuously lose your place. This problem was solved by adding the amounts necessary within the recipe on each step where it is required. Amounts were only included on the ingredient list where it was important (5 tomatoes; 10 stalks of scallions; etc).
A testament to how far my family has been removed from our Chinese heritage is that I could not get any recipes passed down through my family. The sad reality for most of us is that we turn to the internet for recipes - I credit this family-run blog for all of my recipes! They were only slightly modified by my own tastes and preferences.
Process: Cookbook
As for the quilt, I took a class during wintersession called Digital Embroidery and begged the Textiles department to let me use their machine. These are some photos of the software, in which I imported Illustrator vector files.
This is a video of the Tajima embroidery machine at work.
Initial sew-outs.
Quilt sandwich being pinned together (top layer, backing, and batting in between).
Sewing together the quilt sandwich on a sewing machine.
Finally, sewing the jade green border onto the quilt by hand.
If you've made it this far in my project, thank you so much for reading and viewing!