Sur La Table Cookbook Club Campaign
ROLES
branding
animation
social
digital
print
TIMEFRAME
1 week
TOOLS
Illustrator
Photoshop
Challenge
Sur La Table’s culinary program is a cornerstone of the brand and a market differentiator. Their in-person classes with chef instructors celebrate unpretentious cooking education that makes even haute cuisine feel achievable and down-to-earth. In light of the COVID-19 lockdown, how could we extend this crucial part of the company to the digital/remote sphere while maintaining the atmosphere of warmth and accessibility so integral to our brand identity?
I had previously worked with the culinary team to overhaul their program’s digital visual identity within SLT’s relatively clean, simple, conservative brand standards. How could we best establish a look and feel for this new initiative that felt unique enough to drive interest and differentiate from the rest of the culinary content, while also not departing too significantly from it?
Solution
The culinary team developed the Cookbook Club program: each month, a class highlights a new cookbook and offers a cooking demo led by the author. Instead of a long class where participants cook a full meal’s worth of recipes, this series emphasizes the chef-authors and their new publications, giving participants an introduction to what else they’d discover when cooking out of the cookbook (which is included in the class cost and shipped to participants ahead of time).
For photography assets, I utilized chef portrait and cookbook covers, with food imagery taking a back seat. SLT’s core culinary classes all use exclusively cooking and finished food shots, so it was important to visually emphasize the Cookbook Club has more of a hybrid focus on the cookbook authors themselves and their books, with just a dash of cooking instruction sprinkled in.
When it came to a logo treatment, I wanted to encapsulate this concept of discovery and collection: constantly uncovering new culinary talent and recipes, getting inspired, and then having a whole new cookbook to play with in the kitchen. The joyful accumulation of a new book with every class felt perfectly suited to animation — great for the site, for email campaigns, and for social media. The final frame of the animation with the full "shelf" of cookbooks worked well as a static version of the logo. I referenced SLT’s existing icon library, emulating line quality and detail in my own build, and typography specs were pulled directly from the company style guide.
Utilizing cooking tools icons from the SLT brand assets, I constructed some graphic frames and dividers for use in this campaign; tilting the icons gave them a sense of informal freshness and echoed the tilted cookbooks in the logo.
With these components developed, there was a roadmap for this program as it expanded and changed — modules advertising in-store cooking demos and book signings as they became possible again, curated lists of other core SLT cooking classes that might engage a wider net customers, print information sheets for store and HQ employees announcing upcoming digital and in-store events, and more. The little ecosystem for this series, including the modular templates for both digital and print assets, allows for the culinary team, marketing specialists, and other designers to create future branded assets that will maintain a seamless look and feel for many cookbooks’ worth of Cookbook Club classes to come.
