A cookbook design that's slightly professional shows you at home with the foods and dishes you cook. Check the cooking section of your local library or bookstore. You will find dozens of books from professional chefs, with a cover image showing the chef cooking at home or at work. Use the same idea in your own cookbook. Take a photograph of yourself in your kitchen, cooking your favorite recipe from the book or just using some of your favorite tools, and make that the cover image.
Older cookbooks were basically small booklets, made from just a few sheets of paper. This is one of the easiest designs for a cookbook, especially if you're making the book yourself, without a publisher. Each page features two recipes on each side, for a total of four recipes. After printing out the pages, you fold each sheet in half down the middle. The sheets are then stacked on top of each other and stapled together, to create a small booklet. Add hand drawn images to the pages that show the dishes being made or, simple-black-and-white photographs of the finished dishes.
Charity cookbooks are less expensive to produce than traditional, full-color cookbooks. The pages are bound together with a plastic spiral. These books usually lack photographs, because color and black and white images increase the price. Add a few sketches or drawings to round out the finished cookbook.