Same Subject, Different Story

TLDR: A six-page magazine feature on spices and curl health — the design challenge was sourcing four stock photos on the same subject without any of them feeling like repeats.

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Stock photography has an obvious trap: search “spices,” get forty nearly identical images of spice piles and wooden spoons, pick the first five, wonder why the layout feels monotonous. Avoiding that trap was the central challenge of this spread.

The article covered how pantry staples — turmeric, cinnamon, ginger, and others — support curl health, which meant the visual library was naturally rich: warm tones, saturated colors, beautiful food photography. The problem was differentiation. With four images to select across six pages, I needed each one to do something distinct. The result: one overhead spice arrangement, one image of spices being sprinkled into a bowl mid-motion, one vertical shot of spice-laden spoons, and a final image of apple cinnamon oatmeal — chosen specifically because it appeared in the meal ideas sidebar and grounded the spread in something tangible and edible rather than purely decorative.

Most Curl features open with a full-page photo, so the opener needed to be the strongest image in the set — something immersive with visual variety. The spice arrangement delivered that: multiple colors, multiple textures, a sense of abundance. The spoon image was originally a contender for the opener, but fitting the layout together revealed it worked better as a vertical half-page, which gave the middle spread a different energy than the opening.

The “7 Days of Curl-Nourishing Meal Ideas” sidebar presented its own challenge. Seven days of meal suggestions is a lot of text in a small space, and adding images would have tipped it into cramped territory. The solution was restraint — generous white space and clean typography so the sidebar could breathe without competing with the surrounding pages.

Three images came from Unsplash and Pexels; the oatmeal photograph was licensed from iStock.

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