A landing page can function as a narrative prologue rather than a summary.
The project revolves around the concept of Shadrasa—sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter, and astringent. Rather than presenting a grid of food photography immediately, I designed a narrative progression: starting with Rasa, moving to taste, then the tongue, and ending with exploration. This mental model transitions the user from an abstract idea to the specific story of a dish.
I made the controversial choice to include a tongue map. While anyone familiar with biology knows the traditional taste map is scientifically inaccurate, I utilized it as a visual metaphor instead of an anatomical chart. It acts as a zoomable, keyboard-accessible navigation hub where clicking a rasa pans the camera to a specific region to open field notes.
To avoid a sterile catalog feel, I adopted a field journal aesthetic. Because India's culinary landscape is too vast for a simple list—spanning temple food, street food, coastal specialties, and Adivasi traditions—I cataloged 84 dishes across eight macro-regions. I moved away from standard card-grid layouts in favor of a two-page notebook interface where users turn pages to learn about ingredients and regional history.
The UI gains personality through specific guides. Each of the six tastes is represented by a character, such as a Fermentation Botanist for sour or a Coastal Navigator for salty. I used DiceBear Open Peeps SVGs for these portraits but intentionally limited their animations to ensure they felt responsive rather than noisy or distracting.
Technically, this served as an exercise in CSS for the mandala and layout, alongside prompt engineering for the content. If you want to move away from Bootstrap-style landing pages, stop treating the hero section like a billboard and start treating it like a prologue.
For those interested in the logic behind the interactive elements, here is a glimpse of how I structured the guide data:
[
{
"taste": "Madhura",
"flavor": "sweet",
"guide": "Guddi",
"role": "Culinary Archivist"
},
{
"taste": "Amla",
"flavor": "sour",
"guide": "Ami",
"role": "Fermentation Botanist"
}
]The final result prioritizes exploration over consumption, shifting the focus from a list of food to a journey through flavor.
All Replies （3）
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Frustrating—users skipped my storytelling flow, but I realized that anchoring each rasa with a character portrait (like the Fermentation Botanist for sour) and linking it directly to the corresponding field notes page might have given them a clearer visual and emotional hook to follow. Maybe I should’ve tested that connection more explicitly.
This looks like a maintenance disaster. Which specific client types actually value this level of custom overkill? I’d start by mapping each of the six rasa characters to a concrete maintenance owner, so the Fermentation Botanist and Coastal Navigator don’t drift into orphaned territory.
I love how you weave the concept of Shadrasa—sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter, and astringent—into the narrative flow, starting with Rasa before diving into taste, then the tongue, and ending with exploration to guide users from abstract ideas to dish stories. The tongue map isn’t just a visual metaphor but a functional hub where clicking a rasa directly zooms into regional field notes—making the experience feel like a living, interactive guide.