Brand redesign for an award-winning cooking app
Kitchen Stories is a global cooking platform with 3 million users worldwide. Available as an app and on the web, the media outlet features recipes with instructive videos and photos, as well as articles covering all things home cooking. Born as a streamlined app to guide homecooks from prep to plate, design is part of the Kitchen Stories DNA. It is frequently featured in the App Store and is the winner of various design awards (eg. Google Material Design Awards 2016 and Apple Design Award 2017). In 2018, the brand launched a rebrand to hit refresh. The aim was twofold: 1. To develop a visual identity that would position the brand as a fun, engaging, and inspiring food platform 2. To unify its look and feel across global markets and platforms.
I collaborated with two in-house designers to research, conceptualize, and roll out the Kitchen Stories rebrand.
With its inviting, sunny yellow outlook, the original Kitchen Stories hue—“Honey Melon”—was intuitively a keeper. The further colors in the palette were chosen to compliment this core hue and were all inspired by ingredients—from “Berry Blue” to “Sourdough”. As a digital first brand, it was important that the colors were accessible in both light and dark modes.
A key update was the redesign of the Kitchen Stories app icon and brand symbol—from plain typographic KS abbreviation to something both fresh and evocative. But how did we arrive at these squiggly lines? Our aim was to settle on an icon that would translate to the global Kitchen Stories community. Think about conventional food iconography: A fried egg is fun but certainly not vegan; a chef’s hat a little too daunting for the home-cook; a whisk perhaps a little too Western. The squiggles we arrived at were born from an exploration into the sensory act of cooking and eating. The result is open to interpretation, but decidedly foodie. Be they tiny plumes of steam rising from a freshly-cooked dish, noodles about to be dropped into a bowl, shredded pieces of cabbage, condiments on a hot dog, plain old water or the icing on your cake—the squiggles show food is universal, but taste is personal.
