Product Design
Alimento is a mobile app designed to help users preserve and share personal and family recipes through emotionally rich, story-driven pages. Unlike traditional recipe apps, Alimento blends practical functionality with editorial design—turning each dish into a curated narrative that highlights the people, memories, and culture behind it. The platform was created for users, particularly women aged 35+, who want a space to document recipes not just as instructions, but as personal legacies. The vision for the product is a beautifully structured storytelling tool that allows users to upload handwritten notes, add quotes and family photos, or select from curated illustrations—transforming everyday meals into meaningful digital heirlooms.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Agency
Inflow
Date
December 2024 - February 2025
The Challenge
Alimento is a mobile app concept with a heartwarming mission: to help users preserve, organize, and share personal and family recipes as immersive, story-driven experiences. The client envisioned more than a traditional recipe manager; Alimento needed to feel like an elegant editorial magazine, where each food story placed the author and their heritage at center stage. Recipes weren't just instructions—they were cultural snapshots, memories, and legacies. Think of a mom, aunt, or grandmother being the model on the cover of a beautifully curated spread.
The challenge was how to merge that editorial aesthetic with a deeply personal, accessible platform for users—especially non-tech-savvy women aged 35+—who might not have ideal content (like professional photos) to work with.
How do you make a recipe page feel beautifully crafted when a user might only have a grainy photo or none at all?
My Role
While our project manager, Quyen Tran, was in charge of drafting initial user flows, I took ownership of the UI design, UX architecture, branding, illustration design, and design system. The project was built from scratch. The clients initially shared a few rough wireframes, which covered basic navigation but did not account for deeper functionality such as recipe export formats, flexible media options, or layout standardization.
The Process
To achieve the editorial but personal experience, I focused first on establishing a functional, flexible form structure—one that would intuitively guide users through telling their story.
Step 1: Structuring the Food Story
We divided the core form into two sections:
The Story Form asked emotionally driven questions: who taught you this dish, what makes it special, do you have a quote from the author, can you upload any related photos?
2. The Recipe Form gathered traditional inputs: ingredients, prep/cook time, instructions, type of dish, and so on. Users could input this manually, upload a photo to extract recipe data via AI, or paste a URL that would auto-populate the fields
Step 2: Designing for Accessibility and Elegance
We designed a standardized template for the food story page to ensure consistency and elegance across different user entries. Each recipe featured:
A cover image with a short handwritten-style caption
A quote and portrait of the recipe's author (styled like a postcard)
A visual carousel of user-selected photos or illustrations
A custom "dish stamp" chosen from an in-app gallery of hand-drawn icons
Ingredients and steps, designed in an easy-to-scan layout inspired by apps like Crouton
We also added thoughtful UI details, like scrollable Apple-style dropdowns for cook/prep time, and a custom keyboard for quickly selecting measurements.
Step 3: Media Flexibility
We divided the core form into two sections:
Upload personal images
Choose from a gallery of prebuilt illustrations (for a hand-crafted vibe)
Pull from a stock image library
The option to include illustrations ensured each page felt complete, even in the absence of personal media, while maintaining Alimento’s elegant brand identity.
Step 4: Sharing and Exporting
A key feature of Alimento was the ability to export stories—either digitally (via shareable links or social media posts) or for print. The print version used a US Letter format with a magazine-like layout, designed to be a foldable, double-sided page that maintained the elegance of the digital version.
Users could preview and revise content before exporting, allowing them to change images, change the colors of illustrations and edit their quotes.
The Outcome
The app was fully designed but has not yet been developed, as the client is currently raising funds for production. However, the work received highly positive feedback. The client felt the design captured the emotional resonance they envisioned, and we delivered a flexible, elegant system that balanced aesthetic integrity with user-generated content.
This project was one of the most multi-layered I’ve worked on—balancing editorial polish with personal flexibility often felt contradictory. But we found creative ways to make it work: using hand-drawn illustrations to fill visual gaps, providing pre-curated content, and keeping the UI grounded in structure.
The biggest insight?
Users don’t need to be designers to tell a beautiful story—you just need to give them the right tools.
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