The aesthetic food journal that designs itself.

The craft

What makes a food journal look “aesthetic”.

Paper or phone, the journals people screenshot share the same few design choices:

• A tight palette. Three or four colours, repeated, beat a rainbow.
• Cut-outs over squares. A dish with its background removed reads as an object, like a pressed flower.
• Two typefaces. One display face for headings, one handwriting face for notes.
• White space. Let a page breathe; one hero dish per page is plenty.
• Texture. Dots, stripes or paper grain behind flat colour.
• A little ephemera. A ticket stub, a date stamp, a receipt corner.
• One shooting angle. All top-down or all three-quarter; mixing reads messy.

At the table

Shooting food for a journal that looks good.

• Window seat if you can get it. Soft side light beats every filter.
• Shoot before anyone digs in. The first two seconds are the prettiest the plate will be.
• Top-down for spreads, three-quarter for tall things — burgers, parfaits, layered drinks.
• Leave a little gap between plates, so each one cuts out cleanly.
• Skip the flash. It flattens texture and turns sauces shiny in the wrong way.

Palette ideas

Palette moods to borrow for any food journal.

Cut-outs

Die-cut dishes, not square photos.

Every dish you snap is cut out on your phone, with a clean die-cut edge, so your board already looks like a page of paper cut-outs. In Share Studio (Premium), saves can wear outlines like Holo, Glitter, Neon, Sketch, Retro or Halftone.

Looks

Looks: palette and type together.

A Look dresses the whole app at once — a palette and a pair of typefaces chosen to work together. There are twenty Looks, plus fourteen palettes and twenty type themes to mix yourself, with separate faces for headings and for writing. System, Light and Dark are free, and so is the default look (Cobalt, with Fredoka and Handlee).

Fonts that don’t ship with the app download once when you pick them, which needs a connection; previews download nothing.

Small touches

Name your diary, pick an icon, choose how saves land.

• A diary name of up to twelve characters, shown in the wordmark at the top of your board. The app is still PlateDiary everywhere else.
• Six alternate app icons, plus a Match my room option.
• How saves land after a snap: Lazy Susan, Hop Home, Tablecloth Pull, Sheet Peel, Pancake Flip, Confetti Pop or Surprise me. The classic snap stays free.

Try it on

Try on before you keep.

Every Look can be tried on with your own diary before you have Premium; a Keep it bar waits at the bottom when you find the one. Look and feel is part of Premium. If Premium ends, the app goes back to the default look without deleting your choices, and they return when you renew.