Give the question a home.
The homepage holds a rotation of meals I’ve made, liked, and want to make again. Each card makes the flavor, format, and time visible before anyone opens the recipe.
Project 001 · Daniel’s Table
A real-life recipe site.
A shared tool for choosing meals my mom and I both enjoy—and keeping the recipes we want to make again.
The problem
“What should we make while you’re here?”
When I travel to visit my parents, there’s packing, planning, and the inevitable question of what we’ll eat.
My mom wants to find meals we can both enjoy. But she can’t see what’s in my head. Truth be told, I didn’t fully know what I wanted either.
The possibilities became easier to understand once we could put them somewhere. Writing has always helped us do that. The web let us make the thinking shared, visual, and interactive.
We needed one place to see the possibilities together before the grocery list started.
What I did
Made the conversation visible.
I treated that recurring question as a shared design brief, then built the site from scratch.
Build for variation.
Each recipe has a serving calculator and an ingredient builder. You can choose a base, add vegetables and finishing touches, or type in whatever is already in the fridge. Then the page turns those choices into a list and moves from choose to gather to cook.
Give the story room to grow.
A separate baked-goods collection gives recipes from my mom’s kitchen a place to grow. The site can document how I cook now, carry forward the things she makes, and gather the beginnings of a larger family story.
The design system
A shared story, translated.
When I was young, I heard the biblical story of Daniel, who chose to eat a little differently. That memory gave Daniel’s Table a deeper frame: a place to document what I like, what my mom makes, and how we find our own way to enjoy food together.
The design needed to feel familiar enough to use at the counter, but particular enough to feel like ours. We looked for what felt true to the way we talk, think, make, and bake—then gave those pieces a place to gather.
D · #315A43leaf
T · #28312Cink
M · #E5BDCBrose
ground · #F3EEE4cream
01 · Color
A palette with our initials inside it.
I experience letters in color. The D in Daniel is a deep leaf green: living, growing, and full of possibility. The T in Trzcinski is dark, almost black: grounded like soil, with the depth of something that has been developing for a long time. M—for mom, and the first letter of her name—brought in a soft rose. A warm cream gives those colors room to meet.
02 · Pattern
A familiar pattern, loosened.
At a glance, the ink-and-cream pattern recalls a kitchen floor, a tablecloth, or a chessboard. Turning the squares into diamonds makes the grid feel less fixed. The recipes can offer enough structure to get us started without locking either of us into one version.
03 · Type
Direct enough to cook from.
When we’re standing at the counter, the type needs to get out of the way. A sturdy system sans-serif makes the recipes easy to find and read. A system monospace distinguishes categories, time, and sequence, so the next step is clear without decorative food styling.
04 · Structure
A rotation, not a finished cookbook.
Opening the homepage feels more like looking through a short rotation we could actually cook than searching an endless archive. Ruled cards and the rose accent make it a clean, living scrapbook. Once we choose something, the recipe leads us from deciding what sounds good to seeing what we need and making it.
In use
One place. Less back-and-forth.
Before a visit, we can open the same site, choose meals and see what we need. I can remember what I already like, adapt it to what’s around, and keep a record of how I cook. Recipes from my mom’s kitchen have their own place to grow. It isn’t a finished cookbook. It’s a shared tool we can keep using.
Your turn
What keeps coming up?
This project began with a question my mom and I kept asking. Yours might begin with a page, process, or problem that keeps returning. We can turn it into something you can use.
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