Nook Cookbook
✦ Art Direction, Branding, Editorial Design & Layout, Vector Illustration
✦ 2022
Nook Cookbook was a charity zine project organized to celebrate the Animal Crossing game series, especially the newest installment New Horizons, which introduced cooking to the series. Talented chefs, artists, and writers came together to create this project to bring the recipes included in the game to life. My role involved branding the project — including creating the new logo and graphic elements used across the project’s social media and shop — as well as designing the book for its print run. The book was a success, with many copies sold and all proceeds being donated to La Via Campesina food sovereignty charity.
Type and book design by me, cover illustration by @Mireiamorante
Process
The first step in this project was to create a brand identity. I wanted to take inspiration from the Animal Crossing series’ welcoming colors, fonts, and icons, without directly taking from the existing graphics. I wanted the cookbook to stand on its own. I envisioned a more rustic, print-like quality to the type that I implemented into the texture of the main logo. When designing the icon, I wanted to pull from the existing Animal Crossing icon while also existing as its own visual. I used the tail end of the leaf in the iconic Animal Crossing series’ logo and used it as the stem of a whisk in order to relate to the games while still concentrating on the cooking theme. This whisk became the main visual icon for our book. These logos were used for social media, the website, and within the book itself.
I was in charge of formatting the 100+ page book and finding the best way to display all the recipes, writings, and illustrations provided by more than 50 talented contributors. One of the main visual elements of the book was the roughened-edge check design with food and drink icons scattered in it. I wanted this to be playful with the check pattern used to evoke picnic blankets. To organize the book, I created a color-coded allergen system to clearly display food information. I also created icons to refer to prep time, cooking time, and servings. All of these icons helped fit the huge amount of information in the recipes in a visually appealing and understandable way. Each chef’s notes were written in speech bubbles mimicking those of the game for added charm. To best integrate everything into the world of Animal Crossing, I created vector graphic illustrations to display the fictional writing pieces and connect them to the content of recipes they referenced. For instance, a blog reviewing one recipe was displayed in a pastel internet tab to make it feel immersive and friendly.
For the final credit pages and other fictional writings, the woodsy, snowy, and autumnal pattern backgrounds emulated the ground seen in the game throughout the seasons. Animal Crossing also uses photos as a way to display your max friendship with a villager, so using photo strips and polaroids as the credit pictures felt especially fitting for the final pages of the book.