Furniture can distinguish a magazine over another. Often these repetitive elements may be used for navigation purposes or to create hierarchy. Other times, they are simply design elements that fit the brand and are revisited issue-to-issue. Bon Appétit features a long list of these furniture designs.
Section headers
In the top left on the TOC is the month that the magazine is in. Somewhere near the month is a yellow text box with black text telling the issue’s theme. Above the month and to the right is the volume and issue numbers.
The section headers are typically also the same issue-to-issue. Kitchen is in all black in front of a dotted overlay with story promos below it. City guides is also in white with a black outline and the featured city is always in a rectangular quote box above it.
Inside the sections, there are repeated markers to know what section you’re in. For example, in Starters there is the word starters in a outlined text box at the top left of the left page and in Kitchen, there is a lowercase k in roughly the same spot.
There’s usually a quote that is repeated in the city guide section or on covers.
Folios
The folios always include the page number with the month and year at the bottom left corner on the left page.
Yellow highlighting & boxes
As visible in some of the earlier photos, a color Bon App often returns to is yellow. They use yellow boxes for highlighting, for text, for backgrounds, and more.
Masthead doodles
The newer version of the masthead is a little more fun. There is a question and various team members will answer it. Their answers are on the masthead with fun arrows pointing to who said it, often with the name highlighted. All in yellow, of course! I think this is an awesome idea because it gives more personality to the magazine and with their answers, you might be able to understand where their personality is shown in the magazine and brand.
Arrows
Stemming from the arrows on the masthead are arrows all throughout the rest of the magazine. Sometimes even on the cover. Sometimes they’re colorful. Bon App uses them to relate captions to photos typically.
Dots
Bon App uses dots in a similar fashion as they do arrows. I think it’s nice to have more than one standard way to captioning photos. It’s not just boring text at the bottom of the photo.
Blue text
Visible in the arrow example, Bon App‘s go to color after black and white text is a light blue. This is considered furniture because it is repeated but not very often and it helps the reader understand that the caption isn’t body copy.
Recipe format
Recipes are always displayed in the same format. It looks almost like a handwritten recipe.
