The first part of my project is my pasta poster. It’s a series of posters based around pasta shapes with recipes on the back of each poster dedicated to that pasta shape (and some history on the pasta shape, where applicable). I looked at different font pairings, and organization of the front-facing posters. These can be easily used as either function or decoration, or both, if you so choose. The paper size is A4, 1/4 the size of the poster below. Check out the iterations, here. The first page is purely font pairings.

The next part of my project is a larger poster (which is not large on paper because I did not get a large enough printer reservation, oops). This part ties into the pasta as a large un-cookbook. It’s a poster flowchart bringing you from type of protein, to the cooking method, to the sauce you can eventually make. The back of the poster opens up 3 times to reveal a page explaining the different types of protein, their properties, and safe cooking. The next opening is on the methods of cooking (it’s a larger page so the methods will get more explanation than the proteins). The final opening is to a large page with “how-tos” for each type of sauce, and what that means. This final page is largest because it comes with the most variation. This is an “un cookbook” because the instructions on the back and the chart on the front (which also hangs nicely) can be used as a catch-all for most cooking (yes, most, there is no catch-all). The paper size is A2. I may or may not include spice combinations (also called “flavors”) on the final poster. TBD on that front. Check out the iterations, here (in the image below hopefully you can see that my charts will have nice fonts eventually when I finally remake them into InDesign, for now it’s just two pieces of paper on top of each other for iteration purposes).

How do these two go together? Because sauce loves pasta and pasta loves sauce and it’s fun to have pasta-specific sauces, but it’s also fun to have sauces and add pasta. Does that check out? I sure hope it does.

Prototype #1: Hand-bound present

For Christmas I’ve been working on making a digital collection of recipes for my family with the intention of making them into a small booklet somehow. It started as a personal project, giving me a reason to actively collect the recipes I’ve known and loved from the people in my extended family, and to (hopefully) centralize my personal cooking experience to not be spread across 3 books and 2 binders and 20 different bookmarked websites.

However, a friend pointed out that, due to global supply chain issues, maybe just making people the books for Christmas would be a good idea, as any actual printing, such as on Blurb, takes an undisclosed amount of time and could, by the time I’m finished, miss the Holiday window.

This set me on a line of thinking about what it means to recentralize the publishing process to be within only a few sets of hands, and how that affects collection, editing, publishing, and distribution.

In terms of collection, I have all the information already, it’s an amalgamation of many different styles and index cards and photos and websites and dog-eared pages, but I already have it translated (mostly) into a large Google doc. But what does it mean to bring things together from sometimes dissonant sources, and place it all under one cover? Does that make me an author, or a collector?

The next question this project will ask: How sterilized can I make these recipes, which come from individual families and people, before they lose all semblance of their origins? When it comes to cookbooks, they tend to be incredibly authoritative, having one “expert” (the celebrity chef, or whoever authored the book, who may or may not have involved invisible ghost writers) or a mysterious set of “experts” (like in the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, we have no idea who actually made all of those recipes, there is no visibility). I want to reclaim the visibility and role of each creator, while also making sure that the recipes are edited for legibility and use. So I think I’m going to include the handwriting and personal notes as a way to keep the character, even if I need to rework/reword the recipe itself.

This leads me to wondering: How does it work to publish and distribute while centralized? When I received my Blurb book in the mail, I took a look at it and thought “okay, I did the thing,” then promptly put it aside and didn’t look at it again. I wondered if this was because my involvement in the actual process of bookmaking was so limited. For this project, I want to hand bind the book, recentralizing the entire thing to be a process that I play a generous hand in. My goal is to publish 5 copies, print, and sew-bind them together with the option of making a cover (we will see on that front when I get further into the project). I would keep the book around 50-60 pages (I want 3-ish signatures) so as not to overwhelm myself with the task, while still challenging the process. As a gift, I don’t want the book to feel so clean that it feels mechanical. The beauty of the craft is the imperfections, and the personality or “character” that comes with it.

Then, I would be the sole hand in distributing it. Part of the distribution aspect of this project is that only those who I want to see it, can see it. Books on Blurb can theoretically be purchased by anyone, and I want to remove that option and make distribution not a commodified thing. I’m here to make a book, not make money off of people. Which goes against most of what publishing is these days.

Below is an outline of two pages of the potential cookbook. Handwriting from the recipes is included where possible, as are notes about their origins, trying to keep the author as visible as possible.

ON THE OFF CHANCE that this project is not particularly interesting to anyone beyond myself, I did prototype another project idea that my group members liked, below:

Prototype #2: Posterzine

Modeled after the Posterzine created by People of Print, I wanted to create an infomational “Posterzine” of my own. People of Print use them to showcase artists, and I want to use it to be educational. My original idea was to write about plant propagation, but upon realizing that I don’t know nearly enough about plants to even begin capturing enough research, I decided to change the content. Now, I’m hoping to do it about herbs (collection, use, medicinals, cooking, etc). I know it probably is still a lot of research, but I feel a little more confident with it.

The poster will start as a small booklet, eventually opening up into a full poster. I would tackle ideas on how to use differently sized spaces, and how that helps (or hurts) the display of information. What information works better on a small page? And what works better in a large form? Does it even matter?

The picture below is what the poster would look like on InDesign. It would be in color and printed out on A1 sized paper. Here is a Figma prototype for what the reading experience would be.

In this project I would explore what it means for something to be two forms at once. How does that affect classification and distribution? When it comes to distribution, I want this to be usable, but how do you convince people to use something in a transgressive form (it hinges open vertically! what insanity!) and even more, how do you benefit from a transgressive form? I would also have to learn a lot about printing, especially large-scale printing.

This project feels somehow simpler, but I know that in terms of information collection it would be incredibly difficult to create and organize the content. There is also a large art aspect I’d need to work with. However, it is a super interesting form to play around with, which intrigues me. This is the exact opposite of the cookbook, which is easier in terms of content, but more difficult in terms of putting it together. It also interests my greatly (mostly for selfish reasons, lol).

Oh, why are decisions so hard when I have so many ideas?!

Onto ideation!

Idea #1: I kill plants. I really, really, don’t try to, it just happens. Especially when I feel the urge to create new life by propagating plants. That’s when I end up killing plants, always. However, I find that centralized or summarized information is hard to find and so I want to make an aesthetic but useful infographic that brings a lot of information together so that I don’t accidentally ruin propagations again. If possible, I would make it in the style of Posterzine, the magazine that is a magazine but as you slowly unfold it, becomes a poster as well. This idea would be the most challenging artistically (need images), content wise (research), and in terms of form (many panels will be in different directions but all need to be brought together somehow).

• Content: A poster infographic of how to propagate plants

• Medium/format: A1 size poster paper, printed, color

• Question: In which ways would the magazine piece be more effective, and in which ways would the poster be more effective? What does it mean for something to be two forms at once?

• Audience: People who are interested in basic planting

Idea #2: Coming from a family of 70+ people, it becomes difficult to keep track of the family recipes, good side dishes, memorable dinners, weird-but-somehow-delicious concotions, etc. I want to reach out and connect to people I haven’t spoken to in a while and closer members of my family to gather all these recipes and more into a cookbook. I would intersperse all my own recipes up to the present moment, as well as gather ones from friends and my mother that I really like. Essentially, it would be the cookbook for me that has all of my recipes in one place instead of printouts and handwritten ones strewn about. This idea would be the most rewarding because I would get to talk to people, and it would be fun to rediscover favorite dishes. It would be a challenge, however, to edit and organize recipes that come from so many families.

• Content: A familial cookbook, but more specifically a cookbook with all the recipes I want to get from people. Really, I just want an excuse to amass all these wonderful recipes into one book for my own needs.

• Medium/format: 8in x 10in book, color cover.

• Question: What level of sterilization brings all of these dissonant recipes together, and what is the benefit of leaving the individual recipes in their handwritten, messy, but characterized forms? How much can something be edited before it becomes something else entirely? And what does it mean for all of these recipes to be put together under one cover (would it be brining them together, or highlighting their differences)?

• Audience: My personal extended family, of which there are a lot

Idea #3: This was the favorite among my small group when we paired off. I want to make a “Burn Book” that is made to be burned. Impractical? Maybe, but I feel like I see many things on TikTok now that encourage people to “let go” of something by writing it down and then burning it. But paper is easy to keep. A piece of wood is much harder to hide away. Ideally, it would encourage people to actually “let go” of what is keeping them down, and burn it — plus there’s a nice pine scent if I use pine! This project would be the simplest. It would be difficult in actually putting it together. However, I think the wood-burning would be the easiest part as I would just be making lines. I would also need to research types of wood (probably would go with a softer wood that can be cut into thinner pieces (1/2 or 1/4 inch) and pair the whole thing with a marker that can hold up on wood.

• Content: A “Burn Book” made to be burned, with a wonderful pine-y smell

• Medium/format: Pieces of wood with lines burned in to replicate a piece of ruled paper, held together with maybe loose binder rings.

• Question: What can we call a book, and is the form of a book necessary to the evocation of wanting to write? How far can I go from book form until it no longer can be called a book? In the same vein, how close do I have to be before it is considered a book?

• Audience: Anyone who has thoughts/emotions to burn.

And here is the final booklet

And here’s the PDF of the cover and the pages.

And here are some photos of how it came out!

I think the blurb book came out nicely. However, the pages were much thinner than expected. Additionally, I did not fix the bleed properly on my page numbers, so they did not go to the edge. For future publications, I will also move the pages a little farther away from the binding, as the margins on the physical page are nowhere near the same as they are in InDesign.

The font of the title page is Bookman, the same font used in the tumblr logo. Courier oblique, used in all the headers, I picked because of its ubiquitous nature on the blog platform at the time. Garamond is the body text, as it is a readable font for large blocks of text. Helvetica Neue is the font used for the page numbers. I thought about using it for the body of text itself, because it was a popular body text font at the time, but I liked Garamond more, so Helvetica Neue was demoted to page numbers. 

The spaces in “Record of (Dramatic) Events” are used mostly to divide between the multiple entries. I did not provide a notably large space between the header and the body text because, as a small-size publication, I didn’t want to have so much whitespace that it overpowers the small amount of text. Also, it ended up looking more “blog-style” without too much space.

We made up stories during our lunch hour that involved everyone, and a few “ship” stories of people we thought belonged together. “The Hunger Games” is the pinnacle moment of these lunchtime musings. (Spoiler: I don’t win the games.)

The photos included are a special selection of ones I posted to the blog (I thought I was really ~saying something~ with these pictures). The bottom of each page, at the page number, includes a block of color that corresponds to the photos in that section in some way, ideally creating continuity. If there were no photos, I used a color that I felt went with the story. 

The spelling mistakes, the weird formatting, the slang, the absolute drama, and the minutiae that we deemed of the utmost importance are all odes to the era. 

Reader discretion is advised, the cringe is visceral.

Here’s an analogy (albeit a bad one) I thought of while trying to understand content: Storage bins that wind up in the corners of our living spaces, hidden away, and not necessarily remembered, are full of stuff. We don’t always know the exact contents of these bins, but we can be pretty certain they’re full of stuff. If you go through the bins, you’ll find that you’re pretty apathetic towards most of it, but every now and then there’s a nostalgic photo, or even something really cool. Mostly though, it’s just stuff.

That is content. Our bin things. Social media is a storage bin, or maybe even the whole internet is. The bin being there just enables us to fill it to the brim with stuff, with content, so we do. If we share the bin with friends, as social media is explicitly shared, they don’t necessarily have the same thoughts, feelings, or interactions with the stuff in our bins. This is a specific theory on content that exists only with the onset of the internet, and, more specifically, social media. The internet provides an endlessly large bin, one that can hold any type of content, and it never fills up, so we keep adding to it.

But what excludes content? Does an artist who makes paintings count as someone making content? I would posit that it’s content if it’s shared on the internet. Much like how an author doesn’t necessarily make “content” when they write a book, but the social media they share trying to promote the book would count as content. So what is the divide? Before we had the social media storage bin, content (if we could even call it content) was less prolific. I would go so far as to suggest that ten years ago, or more, content could be more like a garage sale. It was more pointed, curated even. The garbage stuff was thrown away, and the better things got sold. People see garage sales as a way to discover, or take home new things. Antique pieces are seen as priceless, and valued. Is that because the garage sale is more curated? Or is it because the stuff isn’t as easily shared? I think it has something to do with the purposefulness of it. Much of what we see on the internet today is purposeless and was just a thought that popped into someone’s head for two seconds. Much like the Dennys Twitter page. Garage sales feel like a more purposeful platform to mitigate all the stuff in your house than just putting it all into bins. However, this brings me to my next question.

Was it content before the internet, before the platform upon which any and everything could be shared? Is content intrinsically linked to the storage and sharing capacities of the cloud? Well, yes and no. Content as we know it right now is part and parcel of the internet. Content doesn’t exist outside the internet sphere in the way a book or a painting or a silly greeting card does, because it isn’t shared in a prolific manner. The books and paintings that got published before the internet age (mind you this is also before things like Amazon self-publishing and Etsy where yes, I know a lot of books and art things can feel more like content due to their shareability) were not an instantaneous decision. They took time, I would argue, and resources, while current content is for the most part, free. Though a counterpoint to all of this would be columnists, who, much like social media stars, in some way have a quota to fill weekly and therefore will sometimes put something out there simply because they’re required to. Does that mean that content needs a platform, or a space to itself? Maybe.

There aren’t easy answers to the stuff that fills our internet world, or how it translates into different spaces and eras. I still am not sure if content is more defined by its ease and prolific nature, or more by the fact that it is shared across platforms. I’m still not even sure if we are able to call anything before the internet “content.” We probably won’t have long to ponder, the definition is sure to evolve again soon enough.

Below are the photos I took on form, I went to the Strand.

Below are the photos I took on type.

The class folder is here.