The client was developing a comprehensive gourmet dog food cookbook with plans for eventual publication. She had spent months writing extensive content covering recipes, nutritional guidance, educational sections, and workbook-style planning pages.
Everything existed inside a single, unformatted Word document. 150+ pages with no visual structure, no hierarchy, no layout logic. She needed a designer who could impose order on mixed content types and deliver a professional product ready for future publishing decisions.
The Client: From Raw Manuscript to Professional Product
The final product had to look professional and polished, ready for future publication decisions. This required deep structural work, not surface-level styling.
Professional Polish
03
Every page needed manual formatting to ensure consistency. Recipe layouts needed to accommodate varying ingredient list lengths and instruction complexity. Nutritional tables required structured data presentation.
Manual Execution Required
01
150+ pages of inconsistent content mixed together: full recipes, quick-reference cards, nutritional science education, ingredient guides, meal planning worksheets, and note pages. No existing design system. No brand guidelines. No layout logic.
Unformatted Complexity
02
The Challenge: Structural Chaos at Scale
Four Key Responsibilities
I was responsible for transforming raw manuscript content into a fully structured, professionally formatted product. This included creating the entire page system from scratch, organizing content flow and hierarchy across 180+ final pages, formatting every page manually to ensure consistency, and delivering organized master files ready for future publishing decisions.
Sole Designer & Layout System Architect
Master File Organization
Content Organization & Flow
Page-by-Page Formatting
Layout System Architecture
Built a modular page system capable of handling recipes of varying lengths without breaking layout logic. Created distinct visual treatments for each content type: full recipe pages, quick-reference cards, educational sections, nutritional tables, and workbook pages.
Established clear typographic hierarchy for readability and scanning, critical for cookbook usability. Maintained neutral, clean styling to allow future branding flexibility and publishing format decisions.
Organized all master files for easy future revisions or format adaptations. The goal was not decoration. It was usability, clarity, and scalability.
Systematize first, design second.
THE APPROACH
Organized Master Files with Canva source files, exported PDFs, documentation, and revision-ready structure
Master Files
03.
Fully Formatted Manuscript with 180+ pages manually formatted for consistency, including recipe templates, nutritional tables, and workbook-style pages
Formatted Manuscript
02.
Complete Layout System with modular page templates, typography system, grid structures, and design specifications
Layout System
01.
DELIVERABLES
The client received a professionally formatted cookbook transformed from a raw manuscript into a structured, publication-ready product with organized master files and scalable layout system.
From Chaos to Publication-Ready
Need a large document turned into a polished, sellable product? If you've written the content but need help structuring, designing, and preparing it for publication, I can take it from raw draft to finished product.
Ready for Your Next Publishing Project?
