The Chinese Stir Fry Sauce Cookbook

I designed the ebook and the launch landing page for The Chinese Stir Fry Sauce Cookbook by Maggie Zhu — nine Chinese sauces used to build forty-one recipes, delivered as an interactive PDF with a clickable contents list and navigation buttons on every page.

Zhu grew up in Beijing and started Omnivore’s Cookbook in 2013 as a hobby, to escape a corporate job. She moved to the US in 2015 and went full time on it; the site is now read by millions of people. This was her first cookbook, and there is no publisher anywhere in the story. No printer, no distributor, no ISBN gatekeeper, no shelf. The entire commercial mechanism is a writer with an audience, a landing page, and a file.

A book with no body

Every printed book I work on gets help from physics. Paper has weight. A spine has a measurable width. An edge takes ink. A reader picking one up has already concluded it is a real thing before reading a word of it, and the design starts from that assumption rather than having to establish it.

A PDF has none of that. Someone about to spend money on a file has no heft to weigh, no stock to feel, nothing to hold up to the light. Every signal a physical book gives away for free has to be manufactured deliberately: a cover that behaves like a cover rather than a title slide, chapter openings that announce themselves, a colour system that gives the thing an interior architecture a reader can sense from inside it.

That work is not decoration. On a digital product it is the only available evidence that the buyer received an object rather than a document.

Designed for the device it is read on

Cookbook PDFs are almost always print layouts that were exported instead of printed. Letter-size or A4 pages, two-column measures, margins set for a binding that does not exist. On a phone that means pinch, zoom, drag, lose your place, zoom again — and it is such a normal experience that most people have stopped registering it as a defect.

But nobody reads a recipe at a desk. They read it standing at a stove, one hand occupied, phone propped against a jar, fingers not clean enough to be doing precision gestures on glass.

So the pages are laid out at phone proportions. Not scaled down — composed to that shape from the start, so every page fills the screen at full size and no page ever needs to be zoomed. On top of that sits the navigation: a button on every single page that returns to the contents, and a fully clickable index that jumps straight to any recipe. Between them, the file stops behaving like a document and starts behaving like an app.

This was the decision the whole project turned on, and it is the one that made the landing page easy to write, because it gave the page something concrete to sell.

Working with someone else’s photographs

Zhu is a photographer as well as a cook, and all the food photography here is hers. That inverts the usual job. The design was not there to supply imagery; it was there to organise imagery that was already better than anything I could have added, and then get out of its way.

The mechanism is the translucent band. Each chapter opens on a full-bleed overhead photograph, dark and busy, and a diagonal panel of flat colour crosses it so the chapter title can sit legibly on top without cropping the image or dimming the whole frame. The photograph stays whole. The type stays readable. Neither has to compromise for the other.

The bands are then colour-coded by chapter — burgundy for the ingredient guide, green for equipment, and so on down the book. On paper, a reader orients by thumb and page edge; they can feel roughly where they are in a volume without looking. A phone takes that away entirely. Colour-coded openers are the replacement: thumbing through, you know where you are without reading a word.

The landing page answers one question

The audience for this page was warm. They already read Zhu’s blog, already trusted her, already cooked her recipes — for free, every week.

Which means the page was never trying to persuade a stranger that Chinese cooking is worth learning. It had one job, and it was to answer the single objection a loyal reader has: why would I pay for this when your recipes are free on the site?

So the page sells structure rather than content. Its largest feature section is not about food at all — it is about page layout fitting the screen, about the button that takes you back to the contents, about the index that jumps to any recipe. The product is not the information. The information is already on the internet. The product is having it organised, tested, and shaped to the place you actually cook.

Scope of work

• Ebook design — cover, chapter openers, recipe layout, interactive PDF navigation
• Landing page design — launch page design, handed over for build

The file was the first thing Zhu ever sold. Everything since — the traditionally published cookbook, the editorial residency at America’s Test Kitchen — came after it. A first product carries a job beyond revenue: it has to prove to its own maker that an audience will pay for what she makes, which is a reasonable thing to make design responsible for.