How to Make a Spaghetti Dinner

It's so hard not to use words, especially when it comes to cooking. There are so many parts of this spaghetti dinner that I wanted to explain, like time and temperature. However, I think that the symbols I used to visually explain this spaghetti dinner How-To effectively communicates the needed steps.

The first thing I did was write out all of the ingredients and directions in words, and then break them down into as few steps as possible. After reworking all of the directions I had, I narrowed everything down to 8 simple steps. I think I learned the most from this initial process. In my head I was brainstorming all of the directions and ingredients needed to make a spaghetti dinner, and it seemed almost impossible break everything down in order to display the least amount of visuals while providing the most amount of information.

After I established the content, I decided to use a flow chart to display the sequence. Each step is contained within the borders of a green box, and the viewer is directed to continue to the next step with a red arrow. This seemed like the easiest way to organize the sequence and allow viewers to visually differentiate between each step. For steps that had multiple elements, I used addition and equal signs. This helped to show what needed to be done, and then what the final result would be for that particular step. I chose to use photographs because I thought the realistic products and directions would help someone cook without words instead of trying to follow my own hand drawn symbols and interpretations.

On the top of the page I included a box for everything needed. The left side is all the food products (some recognizable name brands), and the right is all of the kitchens tools (colander, large pot, etc). I then followed the steps I had written and found images to illustrate each one. The first step was to boil a pot of water. The first box shows a pot being filled with water, plus a heating element on a kitchen stove, which results in hot boiling water. An arrow leads to the next step, which is to place uncooked spaghetti into the boiling water for ten minutes until cooked. The diagram continues on in the same format to show until it comes to the final result; a quick, easy to make spaghetti dish.