Dining Guide

Last week we printed a special "dining guide" section in addition to our regular A and B sections. Our special sections always add extra stress to production weekend because extra workload often falls among a few people. It's always a challenge to create a design concept that is conveyed on front cover of the section and then carried through the rest of the pages. I've been working on the last couple of special sections to make them look different from the rest of the newspaper.
For the cover of the dining guide, a couple other staff members proposed the idea of spelling out "food" with different pieces of food. I was never completely sold on the idea, but other seemed excited about it so I went with the idea. After searching through bigstock for the right photos and trying to play off the overall feel with bright colors, this is what we printed:
I'm still not sure how I feel about the cover. Everyone that I've talked to, which includes our audience, seems to really like it. For the inside pages, I carried over the colors. Here's the first two pages:

I think it's a step in the right direction as far as creating an overall concept for an entire section.