A couple months ago I fell head over heals in love with the blog Good Look Cookbook which is a DIY graphic design blog. Sounds fun right? Today Maralee is joining Kitchen Corners with a guest post to show us how to make stylish recipe cards from home. Ok, Maralee take it away...
I've been collecting recipes for years and have a folder and a card file of cards and papers of all shapes and sizes. Every time I use any of them, I tell myself I need to design something that I like and will use! My inspiration is my embarrassing collection of unorganized, non-designed recipes. Yuck! Not appetizing at all.
For this recipe you'll need:
• classy, fun, yet easy-to-read fonts (I chose a script, and a roman (serif) font that has multiple style (I used the small caps and the italic)
- a floral pattern for the background (find lots to choose from here)
- shapes to keep the elements divided, organized, and anchor the design
- a tasty color palette. I chose banana, kiwi, strawberry and breezy blue
I started in PhotoShop. It gives me the best flexibility for all the mixing I'd be doing. I set up my card size: 4 x 6 (3.5 x 5 is also a standard card size). I used a tint of the color for the background, then arranged the floral pattern along each side to make a nice full border. Then I created a rounded-cornered box for the recipe title, using a tint of the color, but turned on the "multiply" feature, which not only makes it transparent over what it's on top of, it also intensifies the color by the combination of the two. I did the same thing with the box on the bottom edge for the credit, but made the space for the recipe using a white, but with a little bit of transparency to add dimension. I saved this, and made versions in each of the other colors, then saved them as files that would import to a layout program. I use InDesign. From there, I imported the backgrounds, and set up my text boxes and typed up my recipes into a document where I could have multiple cards on each page, and it's easy to continue to add more recipes. Print, trim, and savor the new card. (I also added a row of hearts at the bottom to rate the recipe's "delicious-ness").
Voila! Delicious cards for my delicious recipes!
Tasty Tips:
- choose as many colors as you need to organize the categories of your recipes
- you can print the backgrounds and hand-write your cards if your prefer, just make sure to choose a lighter color palette
- if you have a few longer recipes, double the height of your card and extend the center box to fit the larger space, then score and fold your card in half.
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Designer. Typography geek. Entrepreneur.
Regular design contributor for GoodLook CookBook
Follow me on twitter, read my blog, be my friend on FaceBook, or check out more of my work.
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Designer. Typography geek. Entrepreneur.
Regular design contributor for GoodLook CookBook
Follow me on twitter, read my blog, be my friend on FaceBook, or check out more of my work.
