The contents of my book are mainly a collection of songs and recipes that mean

a lot to me and my family. I chose recipes that have been passed down and around my
family for decades, while even including newer recipes that either I’ve created or
received from friends (there is a recipe straight from the philippines in here. Translated
into english, of course.) While there are songs in there that I do not own (the artists are
cited and I will not be selling or duplicating my book in any form), they are meant for
entertainment purposes. The recipes themselves are what I like to define as ‘soul food’,
aka anything remotely comforting or delicious.

I decided to create my recipe book with 15 double sided pages, or 30 pages in

total. Due to printing issues, I had to sew each page into the book individually instead of
signatures like I had originally planned. This forced me to change my plans and reduce
the amount of recipes I wanted to include. I bound the book with a coptic stitch and
white thread that complements the paper I found for my cover. It is a decorative swirl
pattern with peacock green and gold dots. The inside cover is a solid peacock green to
compliment.

My main focus with the book, since it was a recipe book, was creating a
consistent layout that was appealing but not so much so that it would draw attention
away from the contents itself. I believe that I found a happy medium that is simple, and
a little fun too.

While this recipe book isn’t what I originally planned on making for this project at
the start of this semester, I am glad that it is what I ended up making. I had a lot of
medical issues this semester that caused many issues for me- making it impossible for
me to do many of the ideas I had originally planned, but this forced me to adapt these
ideas and utilize them in new ways. My original idea for the book was to focus on the
book as an object and while I wasn’t able to execute it according to my vision, I retained
most of my core ideas- coptic stitching and a decorated hardcover.

This book has gone through many, many drafts. I originally planned on printing
my recipe book on a beautiful cream paper. I liked the look, weight, and texture of the
paper and thought it complemented the colors of my cover beautifully but due to printer
issues I had to scrap that dream. Another draft concept was creating a cover using
eyelets and metal binder clips to bind the pages to the cover. I was considering this
concept because I liked the idea of being able to add, move, or even remove
recipe/song pages to the book but due to complexity, time restraints, and mobility it was
becoming more effort than it was worth.

Something I struggled with the most, but I think gave me the best results, was
formatting the entirety of the book in the program InDesign. Creating masters and
loading content into the program was a breeze, I enjoyed that the most, but I had the
hardest time figuring out where to put certain items. Another major issue I had was
putting things in the wrong sequence. This caused me to rework, reorganize, and
reshuffle everything more times that I can count. I am glad that I did this though,
because I was able to find a way to make everything flow.