“Science of Food” online exhibit

The Science of Food is an online learning resource that a couple of the science teachers at the Exploratorium created, and I was asked to help create the look and feel for the “exhibit”, as well as the illustrations. The whole site is now live, and very informative!

This is the full color pallet I came up with for the exhibit. The website uses Akzidenz Grotesque, which is the typeface that the whole museum uses.

Most of the design solutions I worked on were for the look of molecules and cell structures. The first step was to figure out what we wanted the water molecules to look like. We decided to not visually depict the molecular bonds with lines and just stuck two smaller molecules on a bigger molecule. The water molecule design we chose is below, and it was ultimately animated by one of the others on the team, using Cinema 4D. It’s not perfectly accurate (hydrogen molecules are tiny compared to oxygen molecules, apparently), but by making them harmonious in size and color we stayed away from making our water molecules garish or confusing.

Below are more of the molecules and cell structures we worked on:

A lipid (oil) molecule.

Starch molecules, represented as hexagons on 3D paths

Translucent circles in a variety of sizes to represent “air molecules,” aka the myriad of gases that make up the air. We decided to not make them detailed because they wouldn’t come up much in cooking.

Water and salt molecules, aka brined water, up against the air.

Below are the cell structures we came up with:

Protein cells

A phospholipid outline

Carbohydrate cell outlines

A bundle of protein structures that make up muscle tissue

Jagged strawberry cells

Muscle structure

These 2D illustrations were then animated by one of the teachers on the team in Cinema 4D, as seen below:

Showing how temperature and pressure affect water molecules and their speed

Brining meat

Starches of a corn kernel straightening out during the heating process

The rest of these visuals can be seen on the Exploratorium’s website in the embedded videos.