This is a submission for Frontend Challenge - Comfort Food Edition, Perfect Landing.
I built Rasa, an interactive culinary atlas that explores India through the six tastes of Shadrasa:
What if a food atlas felt less like a database and more like opening a traveller's field journal?
Instead of starting with a grid of dishes or a traditional restaurant-style hero, I wanted the page to feel editorial, tactile and slightly mysterious.
The landing page introduces the six tastes through a CSS-built rasa mandala and then invites the visitor into the atlas.
From there, the experience expands into an interactive tongue map, character-led exploration, regional food history and a page-turning culinary notebook containing 84 dishes.
Once that relationship is understood, the rest of the application becomes easier to navigate.
Taste receptors are distributed across the tongue, so Rasa does not present this as an anatomy chart.
Selecting a rasa moves the camera towards that region and opens its field notes.
The biggest design decision was to avoid making the experience feel like a food catalogue.
Everyday home cooking Street food Festival and temple food City specialities Folk and Adivasi traditions Fermented foods Coastal cuisines Mountain cuisines Regional ingredients and techniques
The current dataset contains 84 dishes across eight culinary macro-regions, representing all 28 Indian states and multiple Union Territories.
Each dish includes context around its history, ingredients, technique, occasions and regional identity.
The landing page therefore needed to communicate exploration, not simply consumption.
| Taste | Guide | Role | | -------------------- | ----- | --------------------------- | | Madhura · sweet | Guddi | Culinary Archivist | | Amla · sour | Ami | Fermentation Botanist | | Lavana · salty | Neer | Coastal Navigator | | Katu · pungent | Tara | Spice Route Chronicler | | Tikta · bitter | Nima | Ethnobotanical Elder | | Kashaya · astringent | Jamu | Tea and Tannin Cartographer |
The portraits use locally generated DiceBear Open Peeps SVGs, with intentionally finite movement rather than constant idle animation.
Instead of a conventional card grid, dishes appear in a two-page field notebook.
This was my way of making the interface feel like a physical object rather than another collection of UI cards.