Welcome to Headnotes
Portuguese pastries, cheese posters, pasta inventories, and other objects of my affection.
Welcome to Headnotes: Thoughts on Cookbook Design, a newsletter dedicated to the design and production of cookbooks and other exceptional books on food and drink. Each month, I’ll be walking you through the books that catch my eye and talking about how they work, what makes them special, and why they deserve a place on your bookshelf.
Headnotes will also pull back the curtain on the creative process through interviews with the people behind the designs. You’ll learn what a cookbook’s production team does, how they collaborate, and what inspires them. I’ll also be demystifying cookbook design by sharing industry insights, providing handy tips and tricks, and decoding the language of book production.
My interest in the intersection of graphic design and food began in 1999 when I became the Design Director of the groundbreaking food and culture journal Gastronomica. I held this role for 13 years and became deeply involved in curating its visual content (here are a few favorite covers). At Gastronomica, I learned about food and drink from some of the most thoughtful people in the culinary, academic, and art worlds.
Publishers began to catch on to the work I was doing, and cookbook design projects started to come my way. Though I design a variety of books, it was the cookbooks that stole my heart. I love their complexity, and I am particularly fascinated by how this complexity is mirrored in the way they engage the reader. The best cookbooks are equal parts instructive, evocative, and aspirational—they satisfy our urge to nourish, to experiment, to reflect, to dream, and to connect. Few books can conjure that kind of magic.
More than twenty years into my design career, and that spell still holds me in its grip. Although the scope of my work has grown, I still enjoy new cookbook projects. I particularly appreciate their collaborative nature, and I’ve found cookbook people to be among the most nurturing, creative, and generous colleagues I’ve worked with. Headnotes is a tribute to all of them.
I’m sending you off today with a few of my favorite design-centric books on food. Some of these are difficult to find, but well worth the effort of tracking down. I’ll be sharing many more of these with you over the coming months.
When I was the Design Editor at Stained Page News, I wrote an essay about the pioneering American graphic designer Cipe Pineles and her cookbook, Leave Me Alone with the Recipes. This book is an absolute gem, with a fascinating backstory. (This essay was one of three submitted to the IACP when SPN won best digital media newsletter in 2023. Woot!)
Leon: Ingredients & Recipes is bonkers. The first edition has a pull-out cheese poster, a perforated seasonality chart, gatefolds, stickers, die cut interior pages, and many other special design elements (like two ribbons!) that make this book a joy to read.
Fabrico Próprio captures the beauty and quirkiness of many of the Portuguese pastries I grew up with (“Deer Hoof,” anyone?). The design is excellent, filled with photographs and illustrations executed in various styles, different paper stocks, and an elegant bilingual layout.
Let’s Eat Italy! is a behemoth—13 x 10 inches in size, 400 pages long, and five pounds of pure visual delight. Each spread is packed with information and has a different look and feel, making for a lively reading experience (and what must have been an exceptionally complex design process). And by the way, the pasta on those pages is to scale.
Thank you, dear readers, for joining me on this new adventure. I keep a constant eye out for books and people to feature in Headnotes, and welcome recommendations from our community.
And speaking of community, I invite you to subscribe to Headnotes so that you’re included in every new post and discussion. And if you become a paid subscriber, you will receive not only my undying appreciation but the additional benefits of full access to all posts, bonus content, and regular AMA chat.
I hope to see you back here in two weeks when we officially kick things off with a look at a dozen book covers featuring the humble egg.
You were the design director at Gastronomica?? I mourn the passing of that publication. It was so good, editorially and in its design. (Brava!). I once made a fish swimming in an aquarium of aspic to illustrate an article by Jeremy Parzen about the 16th century cookbook author Maestro Martino.
welcome to Substack Frances!!! looking forward to reading more