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Designing with Food Groups

Posted by Marc Bernstein on October 13th, 2005.

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Something I’ve noticed appearing on a few sites lately is images of food for no apparent reason than design touches. Granted, if you are viewing a restaurant, food magazine, or wholesaler you’d expect to see these images - but what about Blogs, design firms, and businesses not related to food at all?

Anyone have any other examples?

( 12 so far )

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I think seeing fruit symbolises freshness. I’m no psychologist but I’d guess a piece of fruit makes the user believe that the content is fresh and therefore appealing.

— Off Topic —

Not quite fruit (in fact not even nearly fruit) - birds and butterflies seem to be used all over the place to add detail to a site.

e.g. http://www.fabrik1design.de/

and

http://www.chillicon.se/ (amazing Flash butterfly)

Andrew Faulkner
October 13th, 2005
#

Hi

The fruits on our homepage are a part of our company name. If you read the “about” section carefully, you will find a weblinke that explains the meaning of the word “designchuchi” - so the fruits are there on purpose, not just by hazard or because they “look” good, although i like the idea of letting a site look “fresh”.

Greetings from Switzerland,
Peter.

Pesche
October 13th, 2005
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Thanks for clearing that up Peter.

Great site none the less.

What other ways can we convey the feeling of “freshness”? Is displaying foods the only option?

Marc Bernstein
October 13th, 2005
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You are welcome. In my opinion of course not. Forms and colours are the two main instruments to let a site or any other design look “fresh”.

Cheers.

Pesche
October 13th, 2005
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Andrew:

Birds and Butterflies have definately been making more and more appearances. I think it’s because they are such graceful animals.

http://pension-am-haffeld.de/?s=&c=de&id=

http://www.computerrecycling.us/

http://www.subdued.net/

Marc Bernstein
October 13th, 2005
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Thanks Mark.

Adding to Pesche, I would say whitespace adds a sense of freshness to a site. So does simplicity.

Andrew Faulkner
October 14th, 2005
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I have a peapod on the home page of my site … my thinking was to have something organic, that spoke somewhat of a genesis of ideas, a perfect forming of something natural in a tech-driven world. If that’s not a too ‘up my own ar*e’ way of thinking!

David
October 14th, 2005
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David,

Love the marketing speak there. :)

(That’s a great photo of a pea-pod by the way. How unique.)

Andrew Faulkner
October 14th, 2005
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In our case it wasn’t trying to look “fresh” that inspired the fruit, I just thought it looked cool :-)

My site offers web site testing services. Not very exciting, right? The only visuals that seemed relavant were browser icons, or web page screenshots. Again, not very exciting. So I stuck the fruit on there, and decided it didn’t matter if it had no relation to the content whatsoever :-)

We had lots of great feedback on the design though, so people seem to like it.

If you’re interested, I’ve also used food (chips) on my portfolio site: www.salted.com

Paul.

Paul Farnell
October 16th, 2005
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Paul,

Thanks for the explanation. I guess it is hard to make stats look exciting. The fruit works well.

And you can’t go wrong with chips. ;)

Andrew Faulkner
October 17th, 2005
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It’s hard to do anything new these days. I’m glad to see that the use of birds and butterflys on the site I did (computerrecycling.us) is considered on the front end of a trend. Most of the time I’m trying not to follow a trend but end up right in the middle of an old one.

Frank
October 19th, 2005
#

nathan pitman’s take on using birds as logos and images in websites

Marc Bernstein
October 20th, 2005
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