Tasmia Sultana
All work09 / 11 · Cookbook

Nine recipes, one set of styles

A 22-page A4 cookbook where the photographs carry the colour and a strict recipe template keeps every page easy to cook from.

Project
The Color Kitchen cookbook
Category
Books & magazines · 2026
Extent
22 pp
Specification
A4 · 22 pp · English · InDesign · Self-initiated
Back and front cover.Fig. 1
The brief

What it had to do

I set myself the brief of a food writer with colourful recipes and strong photography. The pages had to look generous and still work propped up on a kitchen counter.

That meant ingredients and method in the same place on every recipe, whatever the photograph does.

Inside the InDesign file

How it is built

  • 61 paragraph styles and 21 character styles: ingredients, quantities, method steps, headnotes, pull quotes, tips and folios
  • Three parent pages, including dark and light folio versions for pages where a photograph runs under the folio
  • A 12 pt baseline grid through all the text pages
  • An outline recipe number and a colour tab for each recipe, from nine accent character styles
  • A table of contents generated from the styles
A photo-led table of contents.Fig. 2
“The background stays cream and charcoal. Food photographs bring enough colour, and a coloured page behind them would fight the food.”
Recipe 01: ingredients grouped by component, numbered method, a headnote and a pull quote.Fig. 3
Heirloom tomato and burrata bruschetta.Fig. 4
What this shows

A longer edition or a second book can use the same file. New recipes take the styles instead of being formatted by hand.

Thai green curry on a dark spread, using the dark folio parent page.Fig. 5
Beet hummus with pomegranate.Fig. 6
Seafood paella.Fig. 7

Need a cookbook laid out with this care?