layout experiments

I found a shop that sold produce in old-style market bags - as above - but I'm not sure how I could use this within the design. This time I worked using jpegs in Photoshop, then placing them in the inDesign file. I was also using the correct web proportions - as opposed to before when I was just guessing.

In both of the layouts above, there are too many colours and textures - I want to take elements from each, just the most successful ones. Tonight I'm going to brainstorm ideas for names and try to make a decision about the look I'm going for - so that tomorrow I can really get on with designing each page, using the techniques above.

edible letters

I used a technique similar to this on my foundation course, and also in the first project of this year. I want the website to look like it is clearly about food, at first glance, without having to read any of it. That's why I wanted to try making the header of the page literally from food.
I used ketchup, sweet chilli sauce and mayo on brown paper. I like this aesthetic better than the letters carved from fruit or veg, BUT it doesn't really fit with the 'healthy' focus of the website. Ketchup, mayo and sweet chilli sauce are all processed foods, high in sugar, salt and fat - which kind of rules them out, even though I like the way they look here.
With the fruit and veg, it's possible to be seasonal, although that would mean a constantly changing header. I think that the effect doesn't work well with the pear as there isn't much contrast, but maybe with something like a cucumber, this would look better.
I have to say that this is my favourite aesthetic so far, because it was the most fun to experiment with - but I don't know if that translates across to the reader, or even if it should - the subject is quite serious.

Aesthetic / brand / identity

I'm now in Easter 'break' - so won't have any tutorials for four weeks. 8 weeks away from assessment, I'm now working toward final outcomes. This week I'll be working entirely on the website - a pdf of every page, with real data, the aesthetics and name for the site, the online presence for it, and demonstrations of how it would work.

Today I've been trying to come up with a name - something which is very hard for a food-based project, as there are lots of restaurants, blogs and organisations out there already, all with original names! (EAT, Sustain, etc) It will be hard not to tread on anyone's toes. A short, one or two word name for the site is what I need. I've written down a lot of ideas but haven't found the right one yet - I'll work on that this week.

I've also worked some more on the ideas I had last week about how the website should look. My mentor was keen on the brown paper element, mixed with hand-drawn and computer generated. I like the brown paper because it has a market feel - maybe I could use that classic market stall handwriting somewhere too. I worked more with fonts today - choosing which ones to use, and what colours looked best.

At this stage in the project it is getting really difficult to explain to people! I've been working on it for so long that I know everything about the project, and it is easy to forget that other people don't. I need to work on explaining it better - both for my presentation exam, and for the show!

Cooking workshop sequence and web identity work

Yesterday and this week I've been working on ideas for the visual look of the website - somewhere between home-spun and professional. I came up with 5 ideas in my sketchbook, and yesterday I tried to mock these up on Illustrator. There are two examples here. It took a lot longer to do than I thought! There is a lot of work still to be done on this.

Above is the sequence I've been working on today. I'm not happy with it at all! But it is a start. I used Premiere and got to grips with the basics of it. I want to improve and extend this movie so that it shows the whole scenario around the workshop, including how the website is involved. Pete advised me to put subtitles with it to support. He also said that i could take film footage and merge that in too, quite easily.

Scenario experimental stop frame

Last week I used photoshop and some existing photos I had to create a series of images. I joined these together in iMovie to make a short stop frame animation. I lost all the quality of the images when I did this, and it was also a really long process - moving the figure, save as, move again, save as - really tedious. The concept might work but there's no way I could do this for an entire film! I tried using flash for the first time, but it was difficult to get to grips with and I couldn't achieve the effects I wanted.

March 21st - Winter workshop 2

This workshop went really well. Thanks to the brilliant volunteers who I couldn't have done it without! This time I didn't get involved at all, my friend taught the recipe while I documented the whole thing. This worked much better - I took over 80 photos. I also got the participants to fill in feedback forms, which was really helpful. The whole experience was great. I'm putting a few photos up here for now, but I have lots more work to update you on - I'll try to do that tomorrow.

Cooking Workshop 2

Today I designed an invitation for a second cooking workshop. I used this task to explore the aesthetic of the website a bit more - merging together hand drawn and professional. I also spent the day storyboarding a scenario for a film showing how the workshop happens as a result of the website. I'm excited to start filming this! I want to use real places and people, but take photographs of them and try to manipulate them in Photoshop, to make the stop frame. I don't know if this will end up working but I'm looking forward to having a go!

Prorotype cooking workshop

This week I planned and organised a last-minute cooking workshop with a couple of people I already knew, to help me develop and design the event. I sent out invitations (above) and spent time working out what recipe to use, what I needed to bring, where to have the workshop, etc. The exercise of organising the event was beneficial in itself - there was a lot more to it than I anticipated. During the workshop I found it easy to see what areas needed improvement - especially documentation! For the next one I will get someone else to run the workshop, and document it myself instead of taking part.

We made leek and potato soup - seasonal - and I provided homemade bread to have with it. I'm planning to hold another improved cooking workshop soon.

This week I also spoke to Pete, one of the Goldsmiths computer technicians, about the website. He showed me some work by an MA student that was really helpful - I can make short films showing how the website links with community interaction, in order to demonstrate it, rather than making a half-working website. He also liked the hand-drawn graphics I originally started with.

Below, I've started to storyboard scenarios that could become films to explain the cooking workshop:
In addition this week, I also went to see Mathias & Rachel of Loop.pH, who I worked for last summer as an intern. They had some brilliant feedback and advice for me in relation to my project, and offered to help with the web side of the project. They showed me a lot of really interesting and relevant work that they had come across, which I'll be looking at in more detail and posting about on here. Thank you!

Together with my mentor tutorial today, it has been great to hear advice and feedback from a range of people this week. I've got a lot to get on with over the next two weeks - lots of references to look up and research, I need to work on the aesthetic of the website, make a few short films that demonstrate the depth and breadth of all aspects of the site, and organise another cooking lesson. Here we go!

Sustainable Restaurant Association

I found this article on the guardian website just now. Last week the sustainable restaurant association was launched in London. "The brainchild of, among others, Henry Dimbleby of the seasonal fast food chain Leon, restaurateur Mark Sainsbury and Giles Gibbons of the corporate social responsibility consultancy Good Business, the SRA is an ambitious project. It wants to get as many of Britain's 30,000 restaurants as possible to become members by ticking a set of sustainability criteria listed under 14 specific areas. They cover everything from the ethical sourcing of ingredients, through water usage, energy policy, responsibility to staff and the community to the mundanity of things like packaging and paper recycling." However, all a restaurant needs to join is to fulfill 3 out of 100 of the criteria, which makes MacDonalds eligible.

Following the post, there are plenty of comments from people on the article. This is particularly interesting to me because I imagine the website as also being a place that can recommend sustainable restaurants for people to eat out at.

(Posted by Jay Rayner Tuesday 2 March 2010 11.50 GMT guardian.co.uk)

See the article here.

Brit Insurance Designs of the Year

Went to see this exhibition at the Design Museum yesterday, it was brilliant! Lots of really interesting work, a couple of things that were relevant to my own project. Former Goldsmiths students from two years above me were nominated for 'The Incidental'. The exhibition design itself was really nice, and I found it inspiring for our degree show. The room our show will be in has no windows and lots of pillars like this, and it made me see that it is possible to create a really interesting show in a space like this. Also, by grouping the projects in categories, like 'sustainable' or 'conceptual' the many varied things on display make sense. I thought the exhibition design was great.


After the Design Museum I went to Spitalfields to pick something up. Saw these bunnies (part of the east festival I think) and thought they were really funny.

I had a helpful tutorial yesterday with a different tutor to normal. She suggested someone I could speak to about making the web design easier, who I'll see on Monday. Once I've got some advice, I'll set myself a deadline to finish the web design, and then leave it for a few weeks and come back to it with fresh eyes.

In the meantime, I'm mapping and exploring possibilities for local interaction, as a result of the website. I'm going to organise some events that would happen, like cooking lessons, and record them as part of the project, as films or photos.

Today I also sent letters to some major supermarkets and to Defra, explaining my project and finding out if they were interested. It would be brilliant to make this project real.

Wire frame mapping and key image

I've been using post-it notes on my desk to build up a wire frame map of the website, which I've then written out in full (above). I've found this really challenging - especially thinking of appropriate titles for each category of the site - I'm still not happy with the words!

Below, you can see an example layout of a page, which I've made using InDesign. I'm thinking more about layout and content than colour at the moment - these colours are quite boring and probably not appropriate.

To help me define my project, ready for the degree show, I've started a weekly task of summarising it in 100 words or less, and picking a key image which explains the project. This week's words:

The aim of my project is to make consumer food choices easier and simpler, while considering welfare, ethics, food miles, nutrition, budget and location. I am designing a website to help people eat sustainably, which will include a healthy, ethical, seasonal, cheap meal planner, and will feature community cooking workshops and volunteer schemes.

I've also been looking at some interesting websites:

Seed to Plate

I like the design of this site. It's all about growing food.

Food For Kent

'Order fresh, local produce online' - not sure how local the produce is though - not specific enough. Not clear where imported produce comes from.

Guerriilla Gardeners of Elephant & Castle

Online community. Watch the movie!

Guildhall Library

This library has a whole collection just on food - old fashioned cook books, etc. I want to go and visit.

Garden Museum

'THE GOOD LIFE...100 YEARS OF GROWING YOUR OWN' is the current exhibition. Finishes on 7th March so not sure if I'll get chance to see it.

Fight Supermarket Power

I didn't get the chance to go to this free conference by 'War on Want' on Saturday - I saw it advertised in Time Out. Would have really liked to go. The description reads: 'Join War on Want for an inspiring day of debate, discussion and practical workshops on building local alternatives; workers fighting back; stopping the sale of Israeli settlement produce; and who controls our food.' The War on Want website looks excellent anyway.

Site mapping and tutorial

On Friday I laid out all the pages I had designed in the order that they would be linked to make a website (above). Then I had my tutorial with Belinda, who explained to me what a wire frame map was - this will be a much more logical way for me to map the site! This is what I'm now working on - the different categories and areas that the site needs, and how they all link together. Once I've done this I can go about designing each page, and also coming up with community-focused ideas!

Ministry of Food exhibition & web page ideas

I've spent this evening scanning in and colouring my web page ideas. I'm not happy at all with the colour - I didn't give much thought to it, I just wanted to use it to show the different areas of the site. You can see I've experimented with some different combinations, but my priority today was to make the pages make sense.

Here's an example (above). I've tried to think about what the simplest way to communicate the information is, what links each page needs, and what the minimum data necessary is, to make it work. Every time I draw a page I want to change it! So hand-drawing is quite a slow process. I have a tutorial with my project mentor, Belinda, tomorrow - I'm hoping she will have some tips for me in reference to improving this process.

Above, I've tried to map all the pages I've drawn so far, working out how they link together, where they lead to, and what pages are missing. As you can see it's quite complicated! I've roughly coloured all the pages tonight and so tomorrow I'll try to lay them out on the studio wall in a way that makes sense.

I finally got round to seeing this exhibition! A brief summary: "The Ministry of Food examines how the British public adapted to food shortages during the Second World War, learning how to be both frugal and inventive on the ‘Kitchen Front’." I really recommend this exhibition. I could easily have spent hours and hours there - it contains so much information, things to watch, read, and listen to. It is interesting because in many ways, the rationed diet was quite healthy - less meat, more vegetables, etc. However, it also encouraged not just farmers in the UK, but across the British empire, to produce as much food as possible, to use machines, to use less space, etc.... which probably escalated and led to the crazy system of food production that exists today (with little regard for environment, ethics, etc). I really recommend this exhibition. It's £3.95 for a student ticket.
See the exhibition details here.

Panorama: Dying for a biscuit

This programme was recommended to me yesterday and I've just watched it now. It is about the unsustainable industry of palm oil. For me, the programme drives home further how crazy the food industry is. How can it be possible that huge companies and even countries are destroying virgin rainforest and areas of deep peat, just to produce palm fruit to make the cheapest oil available? Products such as Haribo, Pringles, Kellogs Crunchy Nut, and Mr Kipling all use palm oil. Palm oil is usually unlisted on ingredients, it is considered part of vegetable oil - a blend of different oils including palm oil. Indonesia is the 3rd largest producer of greenhouse gases, behind America and China. Half of its orangutang population have died due to deforestation. Illegal deforestation is still happening there now, every day, even in areas of protected rainforest.

Palm oil is difficult to trace because many suppliers of palm oil mix deliveries from multiple companies. Only 3% is certified sustainable, globally. Sainsbury's currently sell own brand fish fingers that only use sustainable palm oil - but it took 10 years to get this product on the shelf. Unilever (flora, dove soap, etc) have made a commitment to make all their palm oil sustainable by 2015. But I feel that is a joke - by 2015 it will be too late, and the effects of the palm oil industsry will be irreversable! Many other companies have similar goals. However, I have to ask - do they not do any research at all when they make a new product? Surely they must decide where they are going to source each ingredient from? Sadly, this cannot be true, as if they did we would not now be in this situation. I am sure that palm oil is not the only ingredient that has serious ethical implications on a global scale. We just don't know about the others yet.

Watch the programme on BBC iplayer here (30mins).

Website research and initial design

I started today by looking at existing meal-planning tools and websites. The NHS five-a-day meal planning tool (above) is something I already know about and have tried to use - unsuccessfully. Although most meals are healthy, you have to choose each meal yourself which is a lengthy process, and it doesn't give consideration to budget or ethical concerns. Try using it here!
The Love Food Hate Waste meal planner (below) is also something I have tried to use. This is difficult as there is no way to tailor the two week menu to your personal needs, e.g. number of people or budget. It is also not very concerned with health. Try using it here!

Foodwitch (see below) is a blog that I came across today. This is quite similar to my own ideas - the author is concerned with welfare and healthy issues, as well as budget. The biggest problem here is the usability of the information. In a blog format, it is hard to use the weekly menus, and impossible to tailor them to your own needs. All prices are based on Ocado, which is not relevant for me. An interesting resource - see it here.
Credit crunch weekly meal planner (below) is part of the site 'Good to know recipes'. It promises family dinners for a week for £40. However this only one meal a day for a week. Looking at the comments at the bottom of the article, the main problems people have are that there is only one menu example - so it only helps for one week of shopping. I want to provide lots of varied menu options. See it here.
I found a fair few other sites, blogs and articles but the more I looked, the less usable they became. Initially I tried to use Illustrator, then Photoshop, to create images of how my website might look. With no experience of web design, I found this really difficult. I decided to use pen and paper for now, and hand-draw my ideas. I have found this much easier. After drawing a kind of frame for a page, I can then scan it in and use Illustrator to experiment with colours and Photoshop to move things around. I can then print this out and evaluate it myself.
Using the website map that I put together on the studio wall yesterday, I've tried to start sketching how the main pages might look. Because I'm working with pen and paper the pages all look very hand-drawn but this is obviously not how they would look.
This process has worked really well for me today - every time I draw a page of the website, I'm constantly thinking about each element on the page, how it should be arranged, how to make it clearer, what pages this page will lead to and how.
I'm finding it challenging to design the website - it is like a different language of design that I need to get my head around! But I'm really enjoying it, and I think that by hand-drawing each page I'm pushing my ideas more and questioning them.
Tomorrow I plan to continue drawing possible web pages, especially those that are community-centred so I can think more about those services. I also want to start thinking about the minimum amounts of data I will need to make the site believable.

Website storyboard

We spent most of today in the studio discussing and debating ideas for the theme and title of our degree show, and starting to develop those ideas. This meant I only ended up with about an hour to work on what I wanted to do today. It turned out this was enough - I pieced together the bare bones of what my website might look like (on the wall of my studio), how all the pages might link together, and came up with some more community focused ideas.
Tomorrow I plan to produce initial visuals of how these pages might look. I feel excited about the prospect of designing what has been in my head for ages!

Prototype Presentation February 15th

During a one-day project a few weeks ago, I decided to take the small area of New Cross, then chose a recipe at random and recorded the prices of each ingredient in five different stores. I then worked out the cheapest way of making the recipe, and how much it cost to make it organic. I put this information into a mini leaflet, with a map showing where the shops were.

Then I made the same recipe leaflet but in my own area of N1, where I know the markets and shops a bit better. I quickly realised that the recipe I had chosen – beetroot and bean pasta – was out of season, and should really be made in the summer. I also decided to rule out online delivery stores such as Ocado as an option, because using only local stores would help to keep them open.

I wanted to establish whether other people felt confused about ethical issues when buying food, and also to get an idea of how much people spend on food each week. I used a method that was successful in one of my earlier projects – putting postcards in bus stops with questions on, in order to get text responses. However, after putting cards in bus stops for a few weeks now, I’ve only had one text response. This could be because the questions I’m asking are too personal, or the cards are being removed too quickly.

The system I was using to record prices and map shops wasn’t working, so I made my own map and started using a mobile phone and a numbered shopping list to record prices. This was a bit less conspicuous.

I found another obstacle in that it would be difficult to predict prices and availability for ingredients that are currently not in season.

I realised that the guidelines I’m using to select ingredients, and the reasons behind them, needed to be included with the service, so that people trust the meal plans.

I was also photographing each shop, and numbering the photos to correspond with the map.

I was using a database to record the prices of each ingredient in different stores, which was becoming increasingly complicated.

So I have come to the decision that my final piece will be a website. At the moment, I picture it as a tool, where someone can enter their postcode, budget, number of meals needed, preparation time available, the time of year, and for how many people – then they choose meal options from the results, and get shopping lists, a map of where the shops are, a meal planner and recipes.

I’ve started thinking about what ideas and service could emerge from this basic structure. There could be an email or text service, which tells you what to buy each day and where, and fits into your own routine. Users of the website could register in order to get a more personalised service – so that meal plans don’t become repetitive, for example.

There might be a shopping scheme for people who are elderly or too busy to shop for food – run by local volunteers. This could be integrated into shopping lists, for example asking users if they would mind picking up an extra pack of sausages for their neighbour.

There could be seasonal community cooking lessons, so that people learn what is in season and can teach each other how to cook with it. Users could submit their own recipes to the site, which would then be categorised by area, month and price, and be added to other people’s meal plans.

On Monday 15th February I presented my project so far to five tutors. They suggested that I collect the minimum amount of information necessary to make the website convincing and believable, then communicate and design it really well. They also felt strongly that involving people on a personal level, such as picking up an extra can of beans for your neighbour as I mentioned earlier, should be at the heart of this project. They suggested that I focus on community elements and possibilities. One tutor suggested that there is an opportunity to do something besides a website, such as a tool to help people make shopping decisions.

N1 mapping and feedback

My idea is to provide some kind of service where a person can enter their budget (e.g. for a week), the number and type of meals they need (e.g. 7 breakfasts, lunches and dinners), for how many people (e.g. 2 adults) and their postcode. As a result of entering this information, they will receive a meal planner, recipes, and a shopping list map for the week.

Ethical, seasonal, healthy eating - on a budget.

I've begun the enormous task of mapping the places that sell food in N1, London. I want to compile a database that includes information about the prices of ethical, seasonal ingredients (for nutritious, cheap meals) in each of these shops. I'm doing this recipe by recipe - so far I've looked at porridge (for breakfast) and beetroot & bean pasta (dinner), and compared prices of the ingredients at 5 local shops, Ocado online and Sainsbury's online. I'm making sure that each ingredient adheres to the guidelines I developed through my context report / dissertation.


The task of gathering all this data and then designing a user-friendly, simple way to organise it, can be overwhelming! But I have to start somewhere.

See the N1 map so far here.

In addition to this, I'm trying to get some feedback from N1 residents. I've been using the method that I first tried successfully in October last year, when I was trying to find out what local people wanted to happen to a disused building. This means putting printed postcards in bus stops all around the area, with questions on, and an old mobile number for people to text their answer to. I put up five a couple of days ago, but haven't received any feedback yet. Either people are more reluctant to answer these questions, or the cards were removed before anyone saw them. I've printed off more now and I'll put them up around the area over the next few days.