After trawling through countless food blogs looking for recipes – spending 80% of my time on each website taking a deep, deep dive to get under the SEO churnalism sitting above the ingredients and cooking method – I got a bit fed up. So started this side project – Denner Time.
The core aim was to produce an exceptionally clean website, that uses a strong brand identity to help convey a more relaxed approach to cooking, along with a far more casual writing tone. Reducing that goal down even further – create a library of recipes for myself that give clear cooking instructions, along with a clear ingredient list that’s not hidden behind a five paragraph backstory of the author discovering the meaning to life and next level yoga positions within a secret mayan guacamole recipe.
Starting with these intensions in mind – I decided that if food’s going to be the focus, it can also be in the illustrations and having begun experimenting with sticking a face, some hands and legs on a pie the brand began to emerge.
Taking heavy inspiration from the very early cartoon style of gloved hands, big steel toe cap boots with some rolled up socks, the illustrative style was cemented in place. While the bulk of the website was designed to be very reserved in colours, letting the colours in the food do the talking – the brand pallet was anything but.
With the aim of potentially expanding the brand through marketing to merch, the characters needed to pop on big splashes of colour so a pallet of bright pinks, oranges, blues and greens – all pushing to be as bright as possible, giving the brand the zing that hopefully reflects the content of some of the recipes.
