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“Power team! Cass and Sierra’s branding ideas were so unique, and I would never have come up with them on my own. These two really nailed it.”
— Beth Somers,
Food Stylist
Beth Somers is a food stylist based in Chicago who loves creative problem-solving on the fly. Her background is in baking, and she also doubles as a hand model for some shoots.
When Beth reached out, her portfolio site was simple and didn’t clearly differentiate her from her competitors. She asked me and Cass to design a much more expressive personal brand and portfolio site that would showcase her personality and attract more of the projects she loves.
The goals for this project were to:
We chose to design the brand around Beth’s conviction that silliness and precision can and should exist at the same time. From there, two moodboards allowed us to explore different design directions for the brand.
This rich & vibrant direction feels both grounded and modern while it emphasizes the brand’s high quality and creativity.
A quirky & casual slab serif display font paired with a quietly offbeat grotesque body font feels modern as well as fun & friendly. Tart, jammy red with plum and rich eggplant feels bold & unexpected, while olive green, warm chantilly white, and bright silver feel fresh & precise but not cold. The block print illustration style brings to mind potato prints or linocut art and feels both relaxed & creative.
This fresh & airy design direction highlights the fun side of the brand and communicates both flexibility and precision.
An expressive, sauce-inspired wordmark paired with a monospace grotesque accent font is physical, playful & technical. Maraschino red and clear, bright pastels are playful, while deep kale green and milky white add functional contrast that feels warm, not cold or stark. The eclectic, collage-inspired illustration style uses juxtaposition to make the brand feel both fresh & fun.
Beth loved both options and said she was “blown away” by the brand strategy presentation.
She ultimately chose the Playful Picnic moodboard to guide our design direction because its light & airy colors suit her personality better, but she noted that gingham felt too country and asked us to explore some different pattern options.
We raided our kitchens for calligraphy-friendly condiments and then started iterating. Ketchup has too wide a nozzle and hoisin is too thick, but sriracha is just right for lettering.
Starting point in hand, I cleaned the wordmark up in Illustrator using the extreme points method.
The result: expressively handwritten script that brings to mind both beautifully frosted cakes and drizzled sauces like ketchup. The letterforms’ flowing quality suggests Beth’s adaptability, while the rounded forms and low stroke weight contrast feel friendly & playful.
BioRhyme is a quirky slab serif that’s full of fun & casual character but doesn’t compete with the expressive logo when used for headings.
Archivo Expanded is a playfully wide grotesque sans. Its sturdy shapes make the letterforms feel reliable, which makes it perfect for subheadings and buttons.
Archivo is an underused grotesque sans that pairs easily with its expanded sibling. It’s somewhat squarish, which suggests precision, but it doesn’t feel too techie for this brand. It’s also plenty legible as body text.
We chose cherry as the primary brand color because it’s bold and energetic. Clear pastels like butter, mint, and sky bring a sense of play, while nori and salt add functional contrast and balance.
Overall, the palette is vibrant but not overwhelming so the brand feels approachable, modern, and easy to navigate.
When we dug into what Beth actually does as a food stylist, we learned much of her work requires precise tools that go beyond those found in a standard kitchen. Beth’s kit includes lots of spoons and kitchen scissors, but also small paintbrushes, tweezers, pipettes, and rulers.
To achieve a sense of playfulness, we chose a collage-inspired illustration style that juxtaposes simple line drawings of tools with cutout photos and full-color paintings of food items.
By using the brand illustrations to depict the tools of the trade in action, we visually suggest the detailed nature of food styling.
The brand’s yarn-dyed stripe pattern evokes a picnic blanket or casual tablecloth, but it feels more refined than a typical gingham pattern.
We designed the website to function as both a portfolio and a discovery tool. We focused on creating a clean structure that keeps the work at the center while making it easy for industry partners to understand what type of shoots Beth specializes in and see a wide range of her work.
Alongside the visual design, we also improved the backend structure of the site to support better discoverability. This included optimizing page structure, adding alt text to all images, and refining how content is organized so the site performs better in search without feeling overly technical. We chose to build in Framer because it suits the scale of this project and offers built-in SEO features.
One of the primary goals for this project was to improve the SEO of Beth’s site. We found that her competitors who ranked most highly in the Google search results for “Chicago food stylist” were those whose portfolio sites used alt text consistently, so we made it our priority to ensure that every image on Beth’s site has useful and descriptive alt text.
Before the redesign, Beth’s portfolio had a Chrome Lighthouse SEO score of 85, which left plenty of room for improvement. After our rebuild, this score is now a full 100!
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