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Recipe Cards

Tests and experiments

Ashley Boyne

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The quality of the designs I have used for my recipe cards here are fairly basic. One of the strengths of these recipe cards is the strong brand identity. Just from a quick glance a consumer is able to see that these recipes are centered around Great Britain. For the first card recipe card, imagery is used more strongly by using different shades of green. It progresses the Union Jack to be that of vegetarian symbolism as many vegetarians are attributed to have a diet consisting of many greens (vegetables).

Another strength of the bottom design is the typeface used. It can be linked to the ‘olde British’ culture at a time when quills rather than biro’s were used. This can be seen in the jagged edges of the letters and sharp points. This again offers strong brand recognition to the potential consumers.

Regarding the bottom design; although offering strong brand recognition, the typeface for the ingredients and method act as a hindrance to the readability. This is unjustifiable as it contradicts the main purpose of a recipe card: being able to understand what is written. As well as this, it leads to slow production for whoever is cooking.

Another weakness is the image used on both recipe cards of the toad in the hole. When an image is used for a toad in the hole in a recipe card, what do you want? Battered heaven, or veggie hell? Because at the moment, some may say this sausage is rather undesirable.

One way to improve the on the image on show at the moment would be to hire professional food photographers to take studio shots of the recipe to improve its attractiveness to potential consumers. At the moment a poor stock image is used, and it is a detriment to the overall aesthetic.

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For these recipe cards, a number of strengths and weaknesses can be attributed to the designs. Regarding strengths, for the design on the left hand side, the card can be regonised by established vegetarians as a vegetarian recipe because a vegetarian society logo has been used. This is a big plus as it offers acknowledgement to the potential consumer that an esteemed establish such as the vegetarian society has deemed the recipe cards suitable. Another strength is the inclusion of the serving amount, preparation time and cook time. Firstly, a productive bonus of this is the fact that this will save time to the user of this recipe as well as offering answers to questions that may have been raised had this information not been included. An aesthetic bonus to this is the green typeface. This again ties in to the vegetarian ‘greenie’ brand, once again offering brand recognisability.

A weakness for the left hand side design is the fact that the title of the dish has not been stated. When you link this in with a poor stock photo being used, confusion is inevitable. This harms sales of the product as well as reputation of the company producing them and the vegetarian society.

One thing we could improve upon on the recipe card on the left would be the adding of a title. At the moment the recipe card is not clear on what the recipe is for. To improve this we will add aspects of the right hand design to the left hand design. We will do this by adding ‘toad in the hole’ under best of British in a font that has a clear readability as well as a professional outlook.