Concoct™ Recipe Mapping is the flagship creation of Anodos LLC, a visualization project that develops fresh, attractive, and useful graphics for everyday users.

 

Why Recipe Maps?

There are a lot of visual processors out there, myself included, who will take a diagram over a block of text any day of the week. There’s a lot that blocks of text excel at. The storytelling that we do with and around food is a really beautiful thing, and I don’t want to mess with that. But when it comes time to cook the thing, I need details. And I need to see how they work together.

 

Origins

Concoct™ recipe maps were born in a student housing kitchen in Rome in 2014. 

Broadly speaking, I was there during a semester abroad, studying architecture and drawing composition. More specifically, I was in that kitchen trying to make a lemon cake off my phone but the WiFi kept crapping out. My classmates and I had just returned from the grocer with more or less the right ingredients, we were pretty sure, only to be held up by bad connectivity. We would get 5-10 second windows of access to the recipe blog before losing the connection and having to pause for several minutes.

Eventually I had all the ingredients and quantities written down in a nice column, but I was losing patience. As soon as the connection was restored, I quickly skimmed the instructions, drew a flowchart-like set of converging lines and a few instructional verbs, and had just finished the final convergence of ingredients into the baking pan before the signal went down again. I shrugged, and got to work. A classmate who hadn’t been part of the whole adventure walked into the kitchen, pausing at the counter to look at the scribbled chart that resembled a toppled Christmas tree.

“Do you always write your recipes like this?”

“I do not,” I replied, embarrassed and a little prickly. We were in Rome to draw, and draw well, after all.

“I like it a lot. Makes sense.”

I shrugged again, and kept working.

The cake was mediocre. But it got me thinking.