UI/UX Design
Re/Cook is a recipe website designed around a simple idea: you already have what you need. Built for people who want to cook without a trip to the grocery store, the site puts ingredients first and delivers recipes that work with what’s already in the pantry.
This project was completed for ART 324s: Advanced Web Design at West Virginia University. The assignment asked students to design and develop a multi-page recipe website for a hypothetical client: from initial research through CMS deployment. The full process included a design persona, user persona, IA diagram, style tiles, wireframes, and Figma mockups, followed by development in HTML, SASS, and WordPress with PHP page templates.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated $161 billion worth of food was wasted in 2010. A significant part of that waste happens at home; not because people don’t want to cook, but because most recipe sites are built around shopping, not around what’s already there. Re/Cook was designed to flip that model.
To ground the design in a real use case, I developed a persona around Mary — a 23-year-old with a demanding schedule who prioritizes fresh food but rarely has time to shop. Her core frustration: most recipes require a grocery run she can’t always make. Re/Cook was designed to solve exactly that.
The visual direction for Re/Cook was guided by four brand traits established early in the process: dynamic but not dramatic, imaginative but not eccentric, organized but not stiff, practical but not boring. Those constraints shaped every decision: from the ingredient-first navigation structure to the clean, editorial typography and warm color palette.
The IA puts the Smart Recipe Finder at the center of the home page experience, letting users input what they have and surface relevant recipes immediately. Supporting pages (Explore Recipes, Core Ingredients, and Our Mission) reinforce the site’s utility-forward ethos without burying the user in content.
Style Tiles
Wireframes | Mobile and Desktop
The site was developed to the scope of the course project. If taken further, the priority would be making the Smart Recipe Finder fully functional: real input, real filtering, real results. The recipe submission flow and Core Ingredients pages would also be built out to support the community angle of the brand. The foundation is there; it just needs the next phase.
To explore the in-progess site visit https://recipe.paulinaaler.com/