Field Notes – bon appétit: Furniture

Bon appétit designers seem to enjoy using furniture in various ways to highlight areas for decoration and function on their pages.These would include the usual folio, credit and bylines, section heads/flags, teasers and promos, display headlines and subheads. Here are the ways in which they use furniture elements.

Rules

The designers tend to use rules of varying lengths, shapes and widths on the spreads to separate content. For the most part, this is done to aid in organization and hierarchy. For example, in the table f content, rules are placed under the section titles to make them distinctive from page numbers and article titles, as well as from other section heads.

Table of content in 2019 February issue.

Another way that rules are used are to separate pieces of text elsewhere in the articles to add order. This allows the reader to know when a particular blurb ends so text can be placed near other pieces of text without being read together and causing confusion.

Spread in 2019 April issue.

Spread in 2019 March issue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sigs and Bugs 

At the beginning of each article, including the editor’s letter, the articles place little arrows (either plain colored triangles or more typical arrows with a stroke and tail). Then, at the end of articles that span multiple pages, a black square is used as a bug signal to the reader that the piece is finished.

Spread in 2019 April issue showing bug.

End spread in March 2019 issue showing sig and illustration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Illustration

Also, in the example above, we can see an illustration of Elizabeth Moss used for the BoB article. In each issue, there is a brief article featuring a celebrity or chef which is always accompanied with a “floating head” illustration of them.

 

michaelagreer