Food: 'universal yet personal'

(Photo by my boyfriend)

As I mentioned in my last design post,  I co-organized a newsletter for my dormitory this past spring. Well, it was finally posted online last week. You can view the pdf here. 

The newsletter's theme is food, which is pretty remarkable considering how I became interested in cooking and baking only recently. Food seemed like an appropriate, international, and maybe even easy topic to write about because it is both universal yet personal: Everyone needs to eat in order to survive, but what they eat can depend on their culture, preferences, health, beliefs, etc. Food is something that can be shared, which is exactly what people did through their writing in this newsletter. They wrote an article related to food or shared a recipe along with an introduction for why that particular dish is significant to them and/or their culture.

Design-wise, my favorite part is definitely the cover:

 

I wanted to include food-related images that were meaningful to my dormitory, so the four  images on the cover are zoomed-in shots from dormitory events that featured food (Using zoomed-in, detailed images was also a feature that I employed in the table of contents). The arrangement and various sizes of the text visually suggest a dessert, such as a cake on a cake stand. My boyfriend's input was very helpful and appreciated when he saw an early draft of the cover. Among his contributions, he suggested putting a cherry on top to make my intentions more apparent. Plus, it's a fun detail, don't you think?

It was hard not to get a little bit hungry when putting together this newsletter, especially when it came to searching for images to accompany some of these recipes. The Flickr search for pavlova was  definitely a mouthwatering experience that actually inspired me to try making this Australian/New Zealand meringue dessert myself. I used a different recipe than the one in the newsletter, but I'll share more about that in a different blog post. In the meantime, I've left you with a teaser of my pavlova in the first photo above.