Couteau
digital cookbooks

Couteau brings cookbooks to mobile devices. It takes all the recipes to your iPhone with step-by-step explanations, checklists and in-app timers.

In my spare time, I enjoy a lot of food-related things. Cooking is one of them. My library of cookbooks is growing and while browsing one I thought: why are digital cookbooks still .epub- or pdf-files. That why I decided to design a digital cookbook.

One of the first things I did, was looking at a structure of one of my favourite cookbooks: Sergio’s Smaakmakers.

To create a visible hierarchy between chapters and recipes, I’ve designed different pages and cards for those.

Update: While building, I decided to change the structure and defined a view for all the different levels.

One of the advantages of a digital cookbook over a printed one is the ability to set an alarm from the app. But how will this work and what should we do with multiple alarms. To validate this method I created a low fidelity prototype and started cooking a pasta carbonara.

Another challenge was to create a format that could adapt the design of the printed cookbook. I decide to work with the fonts of the printed cooking, a similar approach to how we designed the reader working at Blendle.

I’m currently creating a full prototype in (while learning) Swift, to validate the concept and maybe start talks to ship the first publication.