Turkish Cooking

Book design… I had decided to become a graphic designer with images of posters by Milton Glaser and André François in my mind. André François had designed a poster for printers that had as its title: “Dans le monde des déprimées, l’imprimé porte bonheur”, in a world of depressed people, the printed image brings happiness. There were rows of gloomy people hunched over, in the form of the letter “D” rendered in boring colours and a colourful rainbow right above them. That is what I was going to do, bring happiness and colour to the masses.

When I had my first book design class at school with Brian Grimbly, I was perplexed. I had not been aware that books were designed. I did not see the existence of any design “problem” that had to be addressed. I thought books somehow fell into place by themselves. What was all this about?

The next few sentences are not about the client—she was a lovely person, but about confusion and about my first book project in “real life”. To begin with, the client had asked a costume designer to design her book. The costume designer Naz Erayda, handed the project on to me. But there was a problem. The client was adamant she wanted an existing design. If I were not a relatively new graduate when one still asks for other people’s opinion, I would have said a simple “no”. Instead I discussed the matter with a member of faculty at Mimar Sinan Academy of Fine Arts who said, “of course, what seems to be the problem?”. So, I did what amounted to stealing somebody else’s design for the first and last time. However I styled the photographs with my mother’s tableware and kitchenware. I added some vignettes—printed from woodblocks which are used to hand-print tablecloths—that gave at least a local touch to the whole thing.

A decade later the photographs I had styled with my mother’s tableware appear in a book published by a political advisor. The title of his book? My Mother’s Cookbook.