Photo Book Organization

When making a photo book, one of the first things to do is establish an organizational structure for your book. This helps when someone flips through the finished book and it also speeds up your workflow. It gives you a clear structure to help you select photos and to figure out where and how the photos fit into your book.

If you’re making an annual photo book, the structure is easy – you can organize it by month. For a vacation book, you can organize it by day or the events that happened during your vacation.

When it comes to making a cookbook, there are several options available for organization. It could be organized by the meal (breakfast, lunch, dinner), the ingredient, or the season to name a few. While it helps to have choices, often it makes the decision harder to make. And I don’t want you to get stuck so I’m starting a new design series tracking six cooksbooks I own that will help illustrate key design decisions.

In this blog post, I’m starting with the Table of Contents to help identify how other cookbooks have organized the recipes.

Cookbook Organization

With each of the cookbooks I’m sharing, I’m including the basic organization, the title & author, and a few examples of the sections. Use this as inspiration to look in your own cookbook collection and see how some of your favorites have organized the recipes.

Defining Your Cookbook Organization

So what is right for your cookbook?

Let’s walk through a few criteria to help you figure out how you want to organize your cookbook.

Gut Reaction.

Is there one type of organization that immediately stands out for you? Do you always love when you flip through a cook book with a certain organization? If so, start with that one.

Your next step is to list out sample sections and determine how well the recipes you want to include fits into those categories. If you are getting stuck – for example, don’t know how your recipes fit into these categories – go back and adjust your list. You may want to switch out the categories or organizational structure.

To illustrate this further, if you love cookbooks organized by Time of Day but realize you have few lunch recipes you want to include, switch the categories to something more like Food Type and see if that better fits your recipes.

Simplicity.

Making a cookbook is difficult and time consuming. There are a lot of steps that you’ll have to include. Testing and typing up the recipes. Making the food and photographing the finished product. Selecting and Editing the photos. Designing the layouts.

So you don’t want to overcomplicate the structure. While you may love the idea of organizing it by Emotion, you don’t want the structure to further complicate the process. You don’t want to spend too much time deciding on the right categories and how meals will fall into them.

For example, if you’ll spend hours trying to decide if your grandmother’s potato casserole should go into a Family Heirloom Recipes section or a Comfort Food section…select another organizational structure to avoid having to make those little decisions.

What’s Missing.

Another way to determine how to organize your cookbook is to ask yourself, what do you find missing from other cookbooks you have in your collection? You have a desire to make a family cookbook; ask yourself why. Your motivation is probably because something is missing from yuor existing cookbooks. Use this reason to structure your book.  

One example, you love all of your cookbooks but are missing a collection of your family receipes. This informs you to make a cookbook solely of family receipes. Maybe you want to organize it by family members who reminds of you particular dish.

My Cookbook.

For my cookbook, I’m following a combination of all three suggestions.

Gut Reaction + Simplicity:  Time of Day or Food Type is my initial preference for a simple organizational structure.

What’s Missing: For me, what’s missing from the cookbooks I own, is a collection of our standard go-to meals and how these favorites could be arranged in meal plan format. My goal is to organize our favorite meals into weekend meals that could lead into easy-to-prepare weekday meals.

For example, I want to connect how braised short ribs on Saturday could lead to short rib tacos on Monday night. This would also help link ingredients to different recipes. If I’m using dill for a weekend meal, what are other simple meals I could make over the next few days so I’m not wasting the ingredient.

This will take a little more planning upfront but will make my cookbook more useful and relevant for our family.

Now I’d love to hear from you. Have you seen a creative way structure a cookbook that wasn’t mentioned above?