Alana is Matchstic's Fall intern. She's made good use of our kitchen in her first month here, cooking up some great lunches. Today she writes about her discoveries as a lover of food and design.

By Alana Dy.

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Design is often like cooking. Actually, design is exactly like cooking except the fact that you can't eat a logo or a website.

As an example, imagine a pot-luck Thanksgiving dinner party that you are invited to. The host assigns everyone to cook a dish to share. You want to make something memorable — something that'll set the standard for future Thanksgiving dinners. You want this dish to appeal to all of the party's attendants and appropriate to the party's theme. So what'll you make?

You think, "Thanksgiving equals turkey, but that's way too expected" so you plan on making roast beef instead. However, there are thousands (if not, millions) of roast beef recipes out there and everyone at the party has had to have it at least once in their life, so how will you make yours stand out from the rest? You think, instead of doing the usual and instead do an interesting reinterpretation. Fresh rosemary, minced roasted garlic, coarse sea salt, and freshly ground peppercorns will add a nice twist. By using just a few seasonings of better quality, the flavors are harmonious. You try your recipe once, but it wasn't as tender as you would like so you try again until you finally get it right. Eventually you come up with a solution of cooking it at a low 325º for a few hours to get that savory, medium temperature. At the party, your roast blows everyone's minds.

By changing a few words of this paragraph, it can easily become a short description about the process of, say, a logo design. As a lover of all things food and as the mad-scientist-cook that I am, I have found that essentially design and cooking both involve:

1. Strategy (who, what, when, where, and how)
2. Creative thinking (what can you do to improve it and make it more interesting)
3. Trial and error (and sometimes happy accidents)

Photo by Carl Kleiner for Hembakat är Bäst

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