Product design · Editorial · Recipe platform · Admin toolingSelf-directed (shawnvandaele.lovable.app/about)2026
Shawn's Recipe Box - A Recipe Product Design Playground
“Built a recipe collection as a small product - trading-card recipes, an admin backend for adding by URL or from scratch, on-the-fly meal imagery, and share / email / PDF flows for anyone who wants to actually cook one.”
Client
Self-directed (shawnvandaele.lovable.app/about)
Year
2026
Discipline
Product design · Editorial · Recipe platform · Admin tooling
Best for
Creative + Brand Leadership, Marketing + Communications Leadership, Consumer Brand + CPG Leadership
01Brief
Recipe products are their own hard little category. Photography has to look like food you'd eat, not stock. Instructions have to survive a splash of olive oil on a phone screen. Admin has to make adding a recipe feel like ten seconds of work rather than a data-entry job. And the collection has to feel curated, not scraped.
02Approach
- 01Designed each recipe as a physical-feeling trading card that flips to reveal the recipe, with a big image, a short story, and cook-friendly steps
- 02Built an admin surface that supports pasting a URL, letting AI scrape and structure the recipe, and reviewing the result before it goes live
- 03Wired AI meal-image generation for recipes that don't have a photo yet - grounded in the ingredient list and cuisine so the image actually looks like the dish
- 04Added download, email and share flows so a visitor who lands on the Shawnarita or another recipe can actually cook it later without hunting through the site
- 05Shaped the recipe voice to feel personal - Mediterranean-leaning, pescatarian-friendly, comfort-forward - rather than a generic recipe database
- 06Integrated the recipe box into the wider About Game as a game surface: a card draw can flip into a full recipe with modal, share and save built in
03Outcomes
- A curated recipe collection that feels handmade rather than scraped
- An admin experience that keeps growing the collection cheap - a URL and a click, not a form and a spreadsheet
- A working example of AI in the loop for a content product - generation, review, ship - with human editorial judgment kept in the middle
- A shareable output layer (download, email, share) that respects the visitor's time when they actually want to cook the thing
Credits
Concept, art direction & execution - Shawn Van Daele for Self-directed (shawnvandaele.lovable.app/about), 2026.
