Brand and Packaging Designer
© 2025 Carlita Bryant
Culigraphics
This thesis explores the graphic design process through the lens of a kitchen. Slicing and recombination of food become typographic tools, informing grid patterns and modularity in layout and letterforms. Table conversations and food sharing become frameworks for creative collaboration, strengthening interpersonal relationships.
Short for "culinary graphics," the project draws inspiration from the world of cooking to expand the designers' methodology. It culminates in three pieces that nourish the creative soul: a building-blocks game that prompts conversations and physical image-making, a digital app that centers the cutting board for slicing and assembling your own type, and a publication that covers the symbiotic relationship between graphic design, food, and society.
Monica Schlaug, Thesis Advisor
Part of my research involved getting in the kitchen and learning from the physical experience of food-making. Eventually, I started making image-based grids that used photos of food I cooked. But then I thought: How could I have a grid based on food when I wasn’t considering the actual relation to it? That’s when I got the idea to draw my own letterform grids by using the slicing patterns of different foods.
This logic led me to develop three distinct typefaces: Sumo, Portobello, and Cremini, all made by layering slicing patterns with the resulting shapes of said cuts. Sumo stemmed from an orange, and portobello and cremini came from two different versions of a mushroom grid. My thinking contributes to constraint-based letterform making, but grounds it in physical experience rather than just purely digital or conceptual methods.
Bites is a publication featuring trends analysis and cultural commentary at the intersection of graphic design, food, and society. The modularity of the physical form mirrors the thesis argument that information, like food, is most nourishing when it can be shared, passed around, and experienced differently by everyone at the table.
The publication itself is structured like a tasting menu, making information sharing much more digestible (pun always intended). Impermanent binding suggests the reader has urgency over how they read the publication, what they add to it, and how they want to change it once they’ve consumed it.
Chopping Blocks is a building blocks game featuring prompt card-driven conversation and collaborative image-making to strenghten interpersonal relationships. By centering conversation as a design tool, Chopping Blocks creates space for designers to better understand themselves, their peers, and their creative processes together.
The physical form of the game takes inspiration from materials and toolkits found in kitchens, while the blocks themselves come from the shapes used to build the Cremini typeface mentioned above.
The Chopping Block is a mobile app featuring swipe- and interaction-based gestures to create new modular typefaces. The app draws inspiration from the culinary act of slicing to break down shapes and build grids, ultimately leading to the creation of modular typefaces grounded in physical experience.
Using a combination of Claude and Cursor AI platforms, I was able to code the functionality of the app to make it usable. This allowed me to provide you with a video showing the app’s usability using my own phone as an example of what this app can do!