Contest Brief: Edible Type

Tasty Type

As a way to get in the spirit of Christmas, Food and Graphics were combined to produce the beautiful baby of Edible Type. So we broke off into small groups (mine consisting of me and Beth Taylor) and tried to find a way to make glyphs and letterforms delicious.

Beth was eager to discuss an idea she had in the pipelines, she (and I) wanted to create something that wasn't just a visual representation of a type or glyph but one that played on other senses as well. She suggested producing a small set of onomatopoeic type, meaning we could experiment with colour, texture, taste and font. In short we'd be making letters out of different types of food that represent the word they're made into; jelly equals wobble or something like that. 

So we split off, each of us aiming to return with a list of onomatopoeic words and some ideas of what they could be made out of. So I made many lists looking up examples linking them to initial ideas of taste and colour. 

I then went a bit deeper; list number two explored the original word's definitions which I then went back over, highlighting any words or phrases that linked to the senses.

The next day Beth and I got back together and each of us explained the words and ideas we'd discovered. After a few quick discussions we produced a list of our four favourite words: Pop, Zing, Thud and Ooze. We chose these five because of their practicality, each one had the greatest potential for an exciting mouthful of food without being completely unreasonable.

So the flavour combinations for each word are:

• Pop- Something sweet and pink. Cake or possibly candy floss, either way it must include popping candy for that physical 'POP' effect.
• Thud- Dense and solid, a treat that actually thuds when you drop it. Solid chocolate, mixed with fudge or toffee and biscuit. 
• Zing- A zesty affair, light lime jelly with ginger and lime zest for a sharp tangy taste. Added sherbet for a greater kick.
• And Ooze- A melty, oozy chocolate pudding, sponge with a liquid like centre.

How about presentation?

In order to fully represent each word we decided to choose appropriate fonts that best matched each word's tone and character. The font's we ended up settling on were.

 BubblyBoddy for Pop

Kino MT for Zing

Bauhaus 93 for Ooze

 And Rockwell Extra Bold for Thud

 Although we had started out with the intention to create entires words, it became quite obvious that with one day planned ahead for cooking and production, we'd need to make up for amount of food with the presentation of the food.