Capstone Project: Tastes of the Motherland
Two of my biggest passions are food and culture—so for my final capstone project at Northeastern University, I combined the two interests to create a project that encapsulated who I was and what I loved to express.
Skills/Tools
Adobe InDesign
Adobe XD
Procreate
Overview
For my final capstone project at Northeastern University, I wanted to incorporate two of my passions: food and Filipino culture. A personal project I had already been thinking of making was documenting family recipes, so my capstone was the perfect way to combine that idea with my interests.
Inspired by video games that required the user to interact with objects to progress and facilitate discovery and physical children's books with interactive components, I designed a website prototype evoking the feel of a loved family cookbook.
Responsibilities
- Illustrated 40+ full color assets and hand-wrote titles and annotations
- Self-taught Adobe XD prototyping software to achieve layout and interactivity goals
- Designed page layouts in Adobe InDesign
- Researched from various sources and mixed media such as interactive online games, children’s books, cookbooks, and food essay compilations
Process
Early sketches of the website flow had the user choose a cookbook off a shelf. The book would open up to show the recipes, and clicking on certain photos or words triggered a popup with fun facts. The bookshelf would have trinkets lying on it that were relevant to how the food is prepared, cooked, or served. I eventually simplified this concept into one cookbook with interactive elements within and around it.
I initially turned to inspiration from both virtual and physical sources. Online references were interactive games that required the user to click and interact with objects on the page or virtual storybooks, and physical references were children's books that had interactive aspects like envelopes with letters inside or tabs to pull out.
I wanted to insert a lot of personal stories in this to really convey how directly influenced I was by these dishes, and if I couldn't come up with a strong enough anecdotes to share, I would interview family members or other Filipino friends. I spent a few weeks narrowing down my target audience and researching existing media that catered towards that audience.
Excerpts from my early planning stages—defining my target audience and look/feel
Lists of possible cookbook recipes to include, narrowing them down, then organizing into sections
Once I had my cookbook structure finalized, I used a combination of online recipes, physical cookbooks, and phone calls with my parents to get the recipes. The project was put together using a combination of Adobe InDesign, iOS Procreate, and Adobe XD—I typeset the cookbook itself, drew all the annotations and illustrations by hand, and published the interactivity online.