- Maker: Briana Torres-Boone
- Genre: Project 3 – Multi-Page Text
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5800: Editing, Layout, and Design
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Winter 2026
Description
Here’s the link to view the whole project: https://canva.link/4b9jj9a0cqh5l7u.
For this project, I wanted to create a cookbook that was based on my and others’ experiences through different recipes. It started off as a love letter to my parents, but then eventually became a love letter to cooking itself. I added several recipes that my parents, friends, and family use for their cooking and added supplemental stories. It follows cookbook standard conventions and is built to be easy to read and easy to follow along.
After the dedication and table of contents, the book follows a similar structure—story, picture, recipe, and advice. I wanted it to mirror how, when cooking, how we cook a meal is based on an experience that we had previously. I used blank space for centering text and headers that signified different areas, as well as bullet points to signify sequencing. I used blue and gold as my primary colors to signify trustworthiness. I also use serif fonts and sans-serif body fonts to signify difference in tone as well as signify pacing throughout the cookbook.
Overall, I created an experience that allows for both reading and cooking in the same token without overpowering the other.
Reflection
This project truly put several things into perspective. The main issue that I ran into was trying to figure out who this project was for and what I wanted them to feel. Eventually, I landed on families as well as other people who had built relationships through food, and wanted to recreate experiences of memory as well as intimacy. This differed from my usual writing assignments because I had to build the outline of what I wanted to do with my project. I had to focus on the visuals, the typgraphy, the prose, rather than just being given a prompt and having to write it out.
I’m most satisfied with the personal essays, especially the ones with my parents because I wanted to cement them into memory without being entirely sentimental. I’m least satisfied with the structural consistency throughout the pages. I wish that I had more time to develop the lunch and dinner section stories. They are still strong, but not as strong as I would have liked.
I followed cookbook conventions of ingredients, directions, and serving, but I broke the convention of the recipe as the primary text in a cookbook. I wanted the story to be the focal point of the cookbook, rather than the cooking.
My main theories that approached my work were my understanding of multimodality and visual design and how they worked together to create this artifact. I was also drawing on ideas of cultural rhetoric and the way food functions as a site of memory and identity. I wanted to relay on documentation that was more embodied and relational.
