Resources · codebook
A tabbed reference for plating and food photography, built for catering work first, with a grader that scores a photo of your plate against its own rules.
A quick-reference codebook for plating, built the way I build my other codebooks: tabs across the top, dense tables inside, SVG diagrams where a picture beats a paragraph, and a filterable A–Z index at the end.
The frame is that plating is eight disciplines stacked in a chain, and whichever link is weakest caps everything after it. Composition, color, texture, sauce, vessel, catering format, the camera, consistency. The Overview tab lays that chain out with a diagram and a table that says when each one gets decided, what it costs to get wrong, and how fast it can be fixed.
Every discipline tab follows the same shape, so once you have read one you can read all of them:
Watch out list of the mistakes that show up in working kitchensThe Overview also has a triage table: describe what is wrong with the plate in plain words and it links you to the tab that fixes it.
Eleven tabs. Composition covers focal point, negative space, three levels, the five layouts, and the moves that buy the most. Color has the 60/30/10 split and the brown-plate rescue kit for comfort food. Texture ranks crisp elements by how long they hold in a warm room. Sauce is a six-mark technique library with tool and failure mode for each. Vessel is shapes and a buy-once list. Catering Formats covers four platter architectures, how each one ages, the jig and gold-standard photo, and hold-and-transport. The Camera is a one-window setup, three angles, a 90-second protocol, and a short editing list.
Get Feedback is the working end of it: upload a photo of a plate and it comes back scored against the eight disciplines — a tier, a five-point score and a one-line read per discipline, the single fix with the highest return, and a short prose critique. It will hand you a PDF one-pager with the photo on it, and keep past reads in your own browser. Then a Topic Index with a plated-vs-catered rosetta table and the A–Z.
The tab called Your 16 Plates is what makes this more than a textbook. It is a scored read of sixteen of my own dish photos, tiered A through C, with what works, what is costing it, and one fix per plate. It ends with the pattern in three lines, ten standing rules pulled from those plates, and a 30-day plan.
That is the method I care about: the rules get tested against real output, and the output tells you which rules you actually skip under pressure. The rest of the codebook cross-links to it, so the general reference and the specific diagnosis point at each other.
Three decisions shaped it. It is weighted toward catering over single plates, because a platter has to look intentional at minute forty when a third of it is gone, and that is a different design problem than a composed plate. The same section skeleton repeats in every tab, so a new discipline slots in as a new tab and the index picks it up.
The third is the grader. A reference that only asserts its rules is a reference you argue with; one that applies them to a photo you just took is one you check yourself against. So the eight disciplines are not only the prose — they are the rubric, and the diagnostic of my own sixteen plates is the worked example of the same standard being applied honestly.
Making that work meant putting it on this site rather than in the artifact. The grading call runs on my own key, which means the rubric and the key both live in the Worker and the caller sends a photo and three constrained fields — never a prompt. Four gates open before a token is spent, and every call is one row in an event log from which both the daily caps and the running bill are derived. No counter, no dollar figure written down: change a cap or a price and the history re-reads itself.
Open the codebook and start on Overview. Read the chain diagram, then use the triage table to jump to whatever problem you have had most recently.
brown or light into the Topic Index filter to see how the A–Z narrowsThe grader is free and needs no account. Your photo is passed to Claude and dropped — never stored, never shown to anyone. Everything else on the page is static, so it prints cleanly with one tab per page if you want it on the wall by the pass.