Town & Country Fine Foods

Town & Country Fine Foods supplies pastry chefs, caterers, hotels and restaurants with premium ingredients and finished patisserie. As Creative Designer I am responsible for the visual output of the brand across print, digital and trade marketing, from catalogues and seasonal brochures to launch campaigns, trade press advertising, exhibition graphics and the product photography that feeds all of it.

The brief is constant: hold an established brand together while the business launches new ranges almost every month, and make dense product information quick to read for a professional buyer.

The catalogue alone runs to hundreds of lines with weights, case sizes, codes, allergens and serving suggestions. It has to work as a reference document on a busy kitchen pass and as a piece of brand communication in a buyer's meeting.

The audience decides what to read in seconds, so hierarchy does most of the work. I set the catalogue on a modular grid with a fixed rhythm for imagery, product name, specification and supporting copy, which means a chef can scan a spread for a case size without reading a word of marketing, and a buyer can read the range story without wading through data.

Product ranges carry different weight in the business, so the system flexes. A new pastry launch gets a full spread and its own photography, a staple line gets a tighter listing. Deciding what gets space is a commercial decision as much as a visual one, and I make it with the sales and product teams rather than filling pages evenly.

Because the brand is established, the refresh had to be applied rather than invented. I built templates for brochures, flyers, stationery and trade adverts so the wider team can produce on brand material without me in the room. The system is deliberately narrow, a small type palette, a fixed set of layouts and a consistent approach to photography, so consistency survives the pace.

Photography is part of the same decision. Shooting in house means I can light and crop with the final layout in mind rather than retrofitting a stock image, so a hero shot on a brochure cover and a cut out on an e-commerce listing come from the same session and read as one brand.

Print production sits behind every decision. Stock, finish, fold and trade press specification affect how a layout is built, so artwork is set up with bleed, colour profiles and paper specific adjustments from the start rather than corrected at the proof stage.

The brief was an A6 advert in the British Culinary Federation magazine promoting seasonal recipe recommendations to a readership of professional chefs.

The challenge was to make a small format advert useful without overwhelming the reader. Rather than forcing the full recipe and product recommendations into an A6 space, I used the printed piece as the entry point and a QR code as the bridge to the fuller digital content. That kept the physical design clear and visually focused, gave the products room to be seen, and let the audience take the detail with them when they wanted it.

It is a small piece, but it reflects how I think about format. The page had a fixed size and the content did not, so the decision was about where each part of the message is best consumed rather than how much could be fitted onto the paper.