Create the image

To create a color wheel of pulses, grains, spices, nuts, and vegetables, we organized the ingredients by color on a radial grid template that we whipped up in Illustrator using the Polar Grid tool and printed out on a desktop printer. For the most part we stayed within the lines, but we also didn’t want the finished result to look too neat — hence the bay leaves breaking up the geometry. The camera was placed on a tripod, on a flat plane to the subject, and we shot from above.

Initial image edits were made in Lightroom Classic: We cropped to a square aspect ratio, applied an Auto adjustment to improve the exposure and contrast, and added some Vibrance to increase the saturation of the more muted colors.

At this point, it was time to take the image into Photoshop for some additional retouching to remove grid lines, some unwanted shadows, and some spilled turmeric. While it’s possible to do basic spot removal in Lightroom Classic, it’s way quicker and easier in Photoshop. From Lightroom Classic, rather than the obvious choice of Cmd/Ctrl+E to edit the image in Photoshop, we chose Photo > Edit > Open as Smart Object in Photoshop. Although there’s currently no perfect round-trip editing solution for combining Lightroom Classic with Photoshop, opening as a Smart Object is the better option. It allows you to make further edits, if needed, to the Camera Raw image by double-clicking the Smart Object thumbnail to enter the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in, which has all the same sliders and options as Lightroom Classic. No matter which approach you take, because you can’t place a Camera Raw file in InDesign, when you’re satisfied with the image, you’ll need to save it as a Photoshop (PSD) file and place this in the InDesign document.

Choose the type

In this project the typography plays a supporting role to the image, and the type is intended to be simple (not least because that’s one of the words in the book’s title), straightforward, and honest. At the same time, it should look contemporary and elegant.

Lato is a “super family” available in a range of nine weights. Designed in 2010 by Warsaw-based Łukasz Dziedzic, lato means summer in Polish. It has a massive — and we mean massive — range of glyphs and supports 100+ Latin-based languages, 50+ Cyrillic-based languages, as well as Greek, so if you’re in need of a versatile font family for multilingual publishing, it’s worthy of your consideration.

Another factor — and one you’ll appreciate in a later project when we work with some of the interior pages of the book — is that we also wanted the cover text to tie in with the type used for the interior of the book. Too often the design of a book interior and its cover expose the fact that they were created by separate designers, who seemingly never communicated with each other.

Format the type

To give the type a more informal vibe, we’ve used title case rather than uppercase. There are two weights heavier than Bold in Lato’s extensive family — Heavy and Black — but the Bold weight feels confident without being pushy. Combined with the tight leading, the contrast of the black on white is attention-grabbing from a distance.

The orange punctuation plays off the colors in the picture and helps tie the type to the image. At large sizes, punctuation can look disproportionately large, so we’ve reduced its size (55 pt compared to the 77 pt of the letters). It’s this attention to small detail that will set your work apart from that of your competitors.

With the title at such a large size, Optical automatic kerning yields a tighter, more consistently spaced, result. To cut a long story short, there are two methods of automatic kerning: Metrics, which uses the kerning values designed by the type designer, and Optical, which disregards those values in favor of adjusting the kerning based on the letter shapes. It’s a generalization, but Optical kerning tends to work better at large sizes. But don’t take this for granted: Results will vary according to your chosen typeface, its size, and your personal preference.

Preparing the front cover

Create a color wheel with spices, pulses, nuts, and vegetables.

Speaking of optical, here’s another optical consideration: Aligning the left edges of the two lines of the title looked off to us. By turning on Optical Margin Alignment we ensured that the vertical stems of the T and the H were lined up. This is going to cause the horizontal stem of the T to push left and break the text frame, which makes some people nervous. We think it rocks!

Filling out the width of the second line, the subtitle is arranged on three lines, fitted to the x-height of the large type. And in case you thought we weren’t getting granular enough, let’s talk about the ellipsis (three dots). The ellipsis character (Option/Alt+;) is too tight for our liking, but full space widths between periods look too gappy, especially at large sizes. It’s fortunate then that we have thin spaces (you’ll find them on the Type > Insert White Space menu or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Option+Shift+M/ Ctrl+Alt+Shift+M). We think that an ellipsis built with thin spaces is the Goldilocks ellipsis. Perhaps we need to get out more.