Japanese Cookbook
A Japanese home-cooking publication set in paper, ink, indigo and gold — real dashi and foundations, not thirty-minute hacks.
The challenge
Japanese food online is either a wall of "15-minute teriyaki" or an untranslated fortress. Neither respects the reader who actually wants to learn the cuisine — the dashi, the rice, the patient little disciplines that make it taste the way it does in Japan. The brief was a title that teaches properly and still feels like a place you'd want to spend time.
The approach
We built a design language we named Ukiyo — paper, ink, indigo and gold, with woodblock restraint and motion that eases rather than jumps (GSAP over a Lenis smooth-scroll spine). Underneath sits our shared publishing chassis: statically rendered, every recipe tagged by region and by historical era, with a pantry encyclopedia, equipment guides, substitutions, and a cook mode. The craft is bespoke; the machinery is the same one that runs the rest of the network.
The result
A cuisine site with the authority of a reference and the warmth of a good cookbook — 141 recipes organized by nine regional kitchens and thirteen eras, so search engines find structure and cooks find a reason to stay. Affiliate support is a labeled corner, never a gate. We designed it, built it, and keep it running.