Play, Cook, Kiss: Culinary Tricks

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What is the most important thing in food-making? Despite the quality products, time-tested recipes and cooking skills, it’s love. The passion. In other words – it’s courage. Being fearless leads one into the unknown areas of possibilities and sets the new plots of the future. That is the main message of the culinary book filled by wisdom and charisma of Alfas Ivanauskas, creative director and editor in chief of the Kitchen Mythbusters.

It’s not just a culinary book. It’s an creative and inspirational guide in a form of diary and an album. That is why features of it were adopted and incorporated into the creative process of the design concept. And it came crafty, detail and unique in every page – full various forms of drawings, blueprints of recipes, notes and so on. All this gives vitality to the book and makes it “alive”. Even the recipes were took out of it and places in a special extra issue to make more space for the sense of philosophical culinary quest.

The task for design demanded a lot of unorthodox solutions. Therefore, the visual language is vivid in it: a few different concepts and ideas interact and strengthen each other here. Various composition techniques come hand-by-hand in this book. Also, extraordinary bespoke typeface and caligraphy were used. In fact, the amount of text written by hand could easily fill all the surfaces of the kitchen.

Actually, everything in this book is real: paper applications and collages were cut by hand, layouts were designed by cutting and pasting photo compositions, illustrations were drawn with ink, felt-tip pens and pencils. It got dirty with the paint too – it was splashed all over the place when designing the cover. These collosal efforts were done for the sake of originality.

Play, Cook, Kiss was born in three print houses on 5 types of paper and in 2 different formats. The cover of the book was made out of decorative paper with golden and silver foiling on it. All of this was done to create the best visual experience and give readers the feeling of emotional fullfilment with every page.

This book should be taken personal. As it was written and designed – as another personal challenge which makes one better than he or she was yesterday. That is the taste of life, materialised on paper this time.