House of Bread, recipe book
House of Bread is a bakery based in San Luis Obispo, California. While attending school at Cal Poly, I had the privilege of designing and photographing their recipe book.
Photography
The owner, Sheila, wanted to highlight different loaves, the ingredients used, and the process of dough-making on the cover (shown on the right). She also felt strongly about having a photo to accompany every recipe throughout the book. This presented itself as somewhat of challenge, seeing as loaves of bread themselves are not the most exciting thing when it comes to food photography. Another obstacle to overcome photography-wise was how to set up the loaves in a way that would not make them all appear the same throughout the book. Ingredients used in the loaves were often used as “props” to let the reader know what to expect when flipping through the book.
Layout Design
Because bread-making is a very involved process with lots of steps, most of the recipes (involving yeast and kneading) took up two or more pages. However, some recipes that are more straight-forward baking and less time intensive, only required a single page. So the challenge was how to incorporate multiple page layouts for different recipes, while still having the book itself feel cohesive. Ultimately, two main layouts were used: single column, multiple pages for the recipes with more steps; and a double column, single page layout for the less advanced recipes.
