Creative Writing & Original IP
Crook’s Cookbook
For twenty years, I have created projects for companies, brands and public initiatives — to explain complex ideas, shift perceptions, engage people and reveal the familiar from a new angle.
At the same time, ideas with no client of their own kept appearing. They would simply arrive and distract me with their presence until I finally found a form in which to bring them to life. If only you knew how many unwritten, unlaunched and unfinished projects are still patiently waiting their turn.
They are all different, but I think one thing connects them: curiosity. About language and meaning, visual thinking and life itself.
Objective reality, it seems, is not quite so objective after all. Everything depends on the angle of view. And changing that angle is interesting.
The idea
In the late 2000s, as the internet and new channels of communication expanded rapidly, everyday and online fraud was becoming more varied and commonplace. The idea was not simply to collect common scams of the time, but to warn people: to reveal the recurring techniques, human vulnerabilities and psychological hooks on which typical fraud scenarios are built.
A straightforward list of scams would have been dry and quickly outdated. So the project became Crook’s Cookbook — an ironic anti-manual in which fraud scenarios were presented as recipes: with a set of conditions, a sequence of actions and an expected result.
The narrative format
The satirical format made it possible to address an unpleasant subject clearly and with the necessary distance: not to romanticize deception, but to reveal its mechanics and make the reader more alert.
Fraud recipes may change, but their basic ingredients remain the same. The book revealed these recurring elements and taught readers to recognize them in new combinations.
- My role
- Concept · structure and copy · visual direction
- Tatiana Kharchilava
- Publishing production · promotion · project representation
- Oksana Grivina
- Illustrations
