helloPapa · design exploration · October 2026

Three directions for the look and feel.

A quick inventory of today's prototype UI, then three style directions, each shown as the first three landing-page sections, a recipe overview and one cook-mode step. All of them are tablet-first (iPad landscape, 1180 × 820) and use the real ciorbă content and the illustrator's paintings.

Inventory: where the UI is today

Five static pages (landing, cook-along, planner, boxes, account). The cook-along is the product now; the rest still carries the meal-kit story.

Keep

  • Cook-mode bones. One step per slide, a scene per step, "needed now" ingredients, timers that keep running across steps, wake lock and resume.
  • The watercolour paintings. By far the strongest brand asset. Every direction below is built around them.
  • Bilingual EN/RO on every screen.
  • Structured recipe data (schema v2): groups, timers, parallel steps, estimates. It's what makes the "kitchen timeline" below possible.

Fix

  • 01
    The landing page still sells the meal kit (plan → box → cook, diets, pantry, budget) under the helloFoodie name. The cook-along, dares and brigade ranks aren't on it.
  • 02
    Two drawing styles clash. Thick-line doodle icons sit next to realistic watercolours and read as clip art beside them.
  • 03
    One layout, five times: centred heading, then a grid of equal cards. Content stops at 1080 px, so a 12.9" iPad shows wide empty margins.
  • 04
    Type is too small for arm's length. Card copy is 12.5–13.5 px; labels are 11–12 px uppercase.
  • 05
    No recipe overview. Tapping a recipe drops you straight into the ingredients slide: no time, hands-on effort, servings, timeline, trust signals or "dare a friend".
  • 06
    Cook mode wastes the landscape tablet. The text panel is a narrow 27% column that scrolls; at 820 px tall the timer button and tip fall below the fold; ingredient chips stack one per line. The 6 px progress bar is hard to read from a metre away.
  • 07
    Ingredients take several screens. One big tile per ingredient means 16 tiles of scrolling for the ciorbă.
  • 08
    The paintings go muddy on dark backgrounds. They're processed with the paper made transparent, so any dark theme needs a light "plate" behind the art (see C).

The three directions

Each one is a complete visual system. Open any screen; they're static mockups that also work in portrait and on a phone.

A · modern, calm
Countertop

iPad-native and quiet. Warm stone background, white surfaces, big confident type, paintings on clean white plates, floating glass status chips.

TypePlus Jakarta Sans 800 display · JetBrains Mono labels
SignatureSplit-pane recipe page with a kitchen timeline; "while you wait" cards
LandingRecipeCook
B · tactile, playful
Fridge Door

Every ingredient and every step is a sticky note on a cork board. Peel a note off when it's done; timers are magnets.

TypeCaveat handwriting · Bricolage Grotesque · Space Mono label-maker tape
SignatureColour-coded mise en place, polaroids, steps on a line, friends' notes pinned to a step
LandingRecipeCook
C · cinematic, pro kitchen
The Pass

A restaurant pass at night. Near-black, heat-lamp amber, the paintings lit on cream plates, timers as instrument readouts, dares as order tickets.

TypeDM Serif Display · Hanken Grotesk · IBM Plex Mono
SignatureSpec bar, "run of service" timeline, brigade ladder, dare tickets
LandingRecipeCook

How they compare

Judged against what cook mode has to do: be readable from a metre away, with wet hands, for two hours.

A · CountertopB · Fridge DoorC · The Pass
Feels likeA calm iPad appYour own kitchen wallA restaurant at service
GlanceabilityBest. Biggest type, plain surfaces, nothing rotatedGood for titles; handwriting gets hard below ~22 px; rotations cost a littleVery good at night; the timers read like instruments
Bright kitchenBestGoodWeakest: dark screens reflect glare
Ownable / memorableLowest; it needs the paintings to stay distinctiveHighest; the metaphor explains the productHigh; premium and grown-up
Social & gamification fitNeutralStrong for dares and friends' notesStrong for brigade ranks and dares
Scales to 100 recipesEasiestHardest; each board needs composingEasy
Build effortLowHigh (textures, rotation, peel gestures)Medium
Decision · 2026-10-09 (D20)

A · Countertop was chosen. The landing page (index.html) is the first page built in it. The original recommendation: build the product on A, which fits the brief (modern, clean, tablet first) and is the most legible in a real kitchen. Take C's look as cook mode's evening theme (same layout, dark tokens), and use B's notes as an accent where they explain something: friends' notes pinned to a step, and the dare cards.

Mockups are static HTML with no app logic. Fonts load from Google Fonts. Copy is English only for now; the Romanian titles were checked in all three type systems (ă, â, î, ș, ț render). Social content (Ana, Mihai, the dare) is illustrative, not real users.