Magical
Make transformation visible.
Foodable
Play the ingredients you’ve been dealt.
A small band of friends fresh out of a London university, with a recipe app, a jar of jollof sauce and a lot of nerve. Their rivals? Recipe giants with millions in the bank, in an app store drowning in AI clones. They had belief and imagination. They needed a brand that looked ready long before they were big. That’s where I came in.
What changed.
Shelf-readyUnlocked UK supermarket retail pitches
208Page super-heavyweight brand strategy
1Identity across an app and a food product
50People in custom message testing
- Made a brand-new start-up look mature and trusted to corporate buyers
- Stood out in a saturated, AI-flooded app market
- Mascots and packaging art built to disrupt supermarket aisles
- One voice from the app store to the shelf
The problem
No track record, no famous name, and a software brand about to launch a physical sauce. To win supermarket buyers and stand out among AI recipe apps, Foodable had to look credible from day one.
How I tackled it
- Internal discovery workshop with the founders
- Internal insights, distilled
- Primary and secondary research
- Comparative analysis of the market
- Super-heavyweight brand strategy
- Positive and negative creative direction
- Visual and motion direction
- Identity: core, then support system
- Brand in action: real-world applications
- Project presentation
The opening sequence / 02—04
Food, imagination and a little kitchen magic.
Project overview
Play the ingredients you’ve been dealt.
Foodable starts with a practical question: what can I make with the ingredients and equipment I already have? The identity gives that everyday act of resourcefulness a world of its own—part culinary imagination, part cultural celebration.
- Client / Brand
- Foodable — an ingredient-led recipe app.
- Solution
- A brand strategy, verbal direction and visual identity centred on resourcefulness, food culture and making more of what you have.
- Services
- Brand strategy & positioning
- Verbal & visual identity
- Art direction & illustration direction
- Brand book & style guide
Credits Gavin Roy Nkalubo +
- Brand strategy & creative direction
- Gavin Roy Nkalubo
- Visual identity & brand guidelines
- Gavin Roy Nkalubo
Purpose & creative direction
A little into a lot.
Ordinary into extraordinary.
Foodable’s practical starting point is the kitchen someone already has. The creative direction turns that constraint into a source of possibility: imagination, abundance, connection and rich food culture.
A closer lookThe thinking
The thinking
behind the magic.
Amor fati means embracing the hand you have been dealt. Here, that idea connects the recipe proposition with a world in which familiar ingredients can become something unexpected.
The product proposition, purpose and personality in one line
Play the ingredients
you’ve been dealt.
Abundance
See possibility in what is available.
Connection
Food as a shared experience.
Rich culture
Bring ornament, stories and flavour into the world.
The Divine Stir / core symbol
A kitchen tool,
with another dimension.
A spoon is familiar and useful. Wings, a star and botanical detail give it an imaginative quality. The presentation develops that language into a symbol, related compositions and a fuller family of marks.
Wordmark & logo family
Expressive enough
to have a voice.
The flowing Foodable wordmark provides a different pace from the emblem. It works alone, in a lock-up and in illustrated compositions, giving the system different degrees of formality and richness.
Typography & colour
Character in the headline.
Clarity in the details.
Las Cruces gives display text a distinctive, expressive voice. Cabinet Grotesk supports reading and information. The purple-led palette is extended by cream, orange, gold and a supporting green, with light and dark variants documented in the system.
Illustration & cultural expression
Make the
possibility visible.
The chef characters are active participants in the world: cooking, learning and conjuring. Glowing ingredients, food, botanical ornament and theatrical gestures turn the strategic idea into something someone can recognise immediately.
Brand guidance & product connection
Keep the character.
Make it usable.
The identity is supported by a separate brand book covering logo behaviour, typography, colour, layout and iconography. A portfolio demonstration below explores the ingredient-led product proposition; it is distinct from the original visual identity artwork.
Try the idea / Interactive portfolio reconstructionA useful premise.
A useful premise.
A tangible interaction.
Select ingredients you have.
See how the recipe matches change.
Foodable✦What’s in
What’s in
your kitchen?
Pick a few ingredients.
Let’s make a little into a lot.
Pick ingredients to discover your matches.
A demonstration created for this portfolio, not the production Foodable app. Recipes and matching logic are illustrative.
How it was made.
- Duration
- 16 weeks
- Methodology
- Iterative waterfall with weekly founder check-ins
- Tools
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe After Effects
- Figma
- Adobe Firefly
- GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst
- Nano Banana Pro
- Kling
- Topaz Labs
- Workflow
- Internal discovery workshop with the founders
- Internal insights, distilled
- Primary and secondary research
- Comparative analysis of the market
- Super-heavyweight brand strategy
- Positive and negative creative direction
- Visual and motion direction
- Identity: core, then support system
- Brand in action: real-world applications
- Project presentation
Make resourcefulness feel full of possibility.
The published identity connects cooking with imagination and amor fati: working with the hand you have been dealt. Its winged spoon, star, ornament and illustrated chefs give that idea a recognisable vocabulary. The script wordmark adds movement; Las Cruces and Cabinet Grotesk give display and supporting information different jobs.
Through the Multidisciplinary lensBrand strategy, identity, illustration direction and a practical guide brought together around resourcefulness.
Original identity and guide artwork from the supplied Behance presentations. The ingredient-matching interaction is a separate portfolio demonstration.
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Building a team, a brand or something that doesn’t fit in one box? Tell me about it. I’d love to hear what you’re making.