The New Ancestral Kitchen Podcast Logo
If you’ve opened up your podcast player this week and searched for Ancestral Kitchen, you may have been surprised and delighted to see our new thumbnail image! Would you like to hear a bit about the story behind this image? Spoiler alert – AI didn’t get a look in!
We talked about what image we would like for a bright, clear logo, something you could read in the tiny player image, and that we could use online as well as with any printed materials – should it be a stove? A loaf of bread? Not surprisingly, we were in fast agreement that it should be a pot. Whether we should employ AI to draw the image wasn’t even a question! Alison freehand sketched the little pot with steam, and Rebecca, a supporter and listener in Ireland with graphic design skills, rendered it into an image usable for online purposes.
Alison sent a few versions of the image over to me, and she and I both voted for the same top favorite – the bubbling, happy image you see above, with movement and life in the lines, hopeful and aromatic steam promising nourishment and satisfaction bursting irresistibly forth from a pot of goodness too full to be contained or ignored!
We also needed a new font, and it had to be one Rob could find in Google and use for our website. After being steeped in pages of ancient Anglo-Saxon text and crumbling medieval manuscripts during my research of ancestral histories, there was a shape of letter in my mind that I wanted to find. I hunted up a few likely-looking prospects that had the hand-inked, illuminated-manuscript feeling that was calling to me and shared some sample text with Alison. Not surprisingly again, we both voted for our same top pick and runner-up!
In further research, I looked up the font we had decided to use and found some fascinating information about the creator, who turned out to be a historian and author himself. His name is James Grieshaber, and he published the font we chose to use, Metamorphous, in 2012. He is the author of The Virgin Wood Type Bible (www.virginwoodtype.com) and according to his online presence he has devoted his work to wood type making and history, type design, letterpress and an appreciation of found letters. He carves beautiful wooden letter presses and has taught about wood type and wood type history at the Rochester Institute of Technology, as well as giving at least one lecture I could find at the Museum of Printing.
Seeing his work as a noted type historian – a category of a world I did not even know existed and am beyond delighted to have been even peripherally introduced to – has made me even happier for having chosen his font for our work. A real font, made by a real person, with real history and texture behind it – small wonder we found it so appealing!
You will continue to see changes and adaptations come through as we adjust and settle into our new flavors. With these new elements combined, we look forward to refreshing our online look and hopefully you find it clear to read, easy to find, and a pleasure to look at!