It Has to Touch the Type

It Has to Touch the Type

Produce ONE image, 4:5 portrait: a food poster for a single dish. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the fields?

If any field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put all the questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then draw. Never fill a brace yourself: a value you invented is a value nobody asked for, and it will look exactly as considered as the ones they did give you.

Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.

The examples are only examples. If someone answers a question, use their answer; never fall back to the example because you prefer it.

If the fields are already filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these six lines only

• The dish, and its moment: {what it is, and what it is doing} e.g. a morning bun, icing still running off the lower edge and about to drop
• The title: {the dish's name, lower case} e.g. morning bun
• The brand, and the tags: {a name, and three or four words} e.g. VIBARY KITCHEN · BUTTERY / SLOW / WARM / DAILY
• The three modules: {three, each a short heading and one fact} e.g. laminated overnight — thirty-six hours of cold rest · orange and cardamom — zested the same morning · glazed warm — so it soaks in rather than sits on top
• The footer: {a year, an address, opening hours} e.g. 2026 · No.4 Reading Room Lane · 07:30/15:00
• The ground and the accent: {a stock, and a dark} e.g. warm bone stock, deep coffee black

The overlap law

These posters are built on one relationship: the dish and the headline occupy the same space. That is what makes the page a photograph with type in it rather than a photograph under a heading.

And it is the thing that goes missing, because overlapping risks making the word unreadable and the safe choice is to leave a gap. A reference run of this style placed a beautifully shot bun entirely below its title, touching nothing. Correct, cautious, and flat.

So it is a construction, not a preference:

• The dish's top edge crosses the title's baseline and rises into the bottom third of the letterforms.
• It never reaches higher than that third, so every word still reads from its upper two thirds — which is how a reader completes letters they can only half see.
• The overlap happens across several letters, not at one point, and the dish passes in front.

Physics

Food photographs fail when the mess is decorative. Everything spilled must have come from somewhere:

• Every drip hangs from a named edge of the dish, runs downward, and either hangs mid-fall or has landed and pooled. Never floating, never sideways, never a drip with no source.
• Crumbs are the same material as the subject — the same pastry, the same nut, the same sugar — and they are densest at the base and thin outward. An even scatter across the whole page is confetti.
• One light source. Every shadow on the dish, the drips and the crumbs falls the same way.

The layout

• The title across the full width in a high-contrast serif — Didot or Bodoni in feel, hairline thins, tight tracking, lower case, near the top and occupying about a fifth of the height.
• A ghost of the same words behind everything: far larger, very pale, partly hidden by the dish. The same words as the title, never a different or shortened one.
• The dish centre, filling about three fifths of the page, tilted slightly.
• Tag capsules at the upper left, thin outlines, three or four.
• The brand name upper right, bold sans, right-aligned.
• Three modules around the dish — two on one side, one on the other — each a two-line bold heading with three or four lines of very small text beneath. Three, not four.
• The footer: the year large and bold at the lower left, a hairline rule across the page, then the address at the left and the hours at the right in bold sans.

Colour

The stock and one dark, plus whatever colour the food itself is. No third colour, no gradient, no coloured background, no tint over the photograph.

Never

• ✕ a dish that stops below the title instead of crossing into it
• ✕ an overlap deep enough to hide the top of any letter
• ✕ a drip with no edge to hang from, or crumbs of a different material
• ✕ shadows falling in more than one direction
• ✕ more than three modules
• ✕ a ghost word that differs from the title
• ✕ a coloured or textured background, or any tint over the food

The result

A poster that reads as one photograph rather than two layers: a dish caught doing something, a name it is standing in front of, and every crumb on the page accounted for.