Kind Kitchen
Logo, site, and book design
The Challenge
Kind Kitchen is a concept website that offers vegetarian recipes that are quick, easy, and healthy.
Create a website that presents users with vegetable-based recipes that are in-season, ensuring that they get the freshest produce for delicious meals.
My Approach
Design the recipe website that I wish existed. As a vegetarian, I want a site that is:
Easy to navigate, especially to view recipes based on what produce is in season
Shows me how to prepare vegetables (I always forget how to trim fennel)
Information about which recipe ingredients are harmful to pets (I find myself frantically searching the internet for this while I’m cooking because my dog is a lightning-fast scrap vacuum)
Sketches
I used a dozen different recipe sites to gather information about features that worked well and didn’t work. Through this, I discovered important features like the jump to recipe button, and the cook mode button that prevents your screen from going dark while using a recipe. To showcase recipes that featured vegetables that were currently in season, I played with using copy, hero images, or recipe options.
Wireframes
My sketches gave me a good starting point. From there I moved on to mid fidelity wireframes. Doing this enabled me to get a feel for how the information would flow through the page before I committed to anything.
Digital Draft Round 1
I presented the following drafts for feedback and heard in review that the Kind Kitchen logo was getting lost in the navigation bar. I also heard that the home page lacked a CTA (call to action) and there were opportunities to adjust spacing to allow more breathing room between the lines of text.
Final Site Design
For the final site design, I created a bigger, bolder logo and pulled it out of the navigation bar. It allows viewers to more easily understand where they are, not just because the logo is easier to see but because it also now has more personality. I adjusted the leading and spacing between elements to make the page easier to read and more scannable. I added a CTA to the homepage, a featured recipe that invites anyone paralyzed by indecision to move forward with a choice.
Cookbook Cover
The cookbook cover uses Kind Kitchen’s signature bright, vibrant colors to stand out on the bookshelf and in online shops. Customers will find the fresh vegetables appealing, but it also sets the expectation for the fresh, vegetarian recipes inside.
Reflection
I enjoyed conducting research for this project, looking at many different recipe sites to explore different features. It was also great to design something that I would love to use! In the future, I will create additional recipe pages and make a fully functional prototype. I’d also like to explore marketing more by creating an Instagram account or an email newsletter for this client.