Hi again, today I want to kind of continue from my last post about layout design by talking about a style guide and its conventions. Though layout design is important to formatting a magazine, a style guide is also important in the design and formatting for a magazine. So, let’s learn more about what a style guide is and the conventions that may be used for food magazines.
General Style Guide Conventions:
A style guide is a set of rules and conventions to follow when writing and formatting documents. A style guide has different parts. One part of a style guide is typography. Typography refers to the text and how it should follow certain conventions. The size of the text should be easy to read, and the length of the lines should be a balance of short and long lines. This makes it easier for the readers to read by causing less strain to read. Here is a visual representation of line height and letter spacing.
As you can see from the image, the line height is the space between the top sentence and the bottom sentence, and letter spacing focuses on the space between the letters in a word. Also, when dealing with bigger pieces of text, it should be formatted in a way that can be read and defines the clear points by using highlighted features and headings. This helps in making everything distinct, making it easier to read by making it clear to the reader where to read. Here’s an example of typography of a magazine spread.
This example shows how typography can affect the look of the magazine. For this example, it helps in creating a clean, organized look of the magazine overall. They achieve this by first organizing the text into a hierarchy. At the top of the page, you can see the word “Typography” is larger than any of the text on the page. This can indicate to the audience that this is the title of the article. It then has the text at a smaller size to establish the difference between the title and the content. They also provide a quote on the side of the paragraphs while also making the text size a little larger than the paragraph text. This indicates that this information relates to the information mentioned in the paragraphs. They also placed captions, which is the smallest font size, next to the photos and the quote to provide details on these pieces of information.
Though the size of the font and spacing can be important, the font's choice is just as important. The first rule to follow with fonts is maintaining the “3 font rule”. The 3-font rule means having at least 3 fonts used on the page or design to maintain a cohesive look overall. The fonts chosen should show a contrast between them but also look overall like they “fit together”. The fonts should also be readable, even if they look pretty; they must be read by the audience. This image below displays some font choices that can be used for a magazine.
Typically for a magazine, sans serif fonts work best for achieving a modern look and is also better for text that is in charts, graphs, and diagrams. This is because it is easier to read as the text gets smaller. When picking a font, it should fit the tone of the magazine and the genre chosen. That is why it is important to know the audience as well as the magazine to make sure the font conveys its meaning.
Color:
Another important part of a style guide is the color palette of the fonts. Colors can help in differentiating text from one another as well as indicating the hierarchy of the text, such as the sub-headings being in a colored font and the title being in a different colored font.
For a food magazine, warm tones like red, orange, or yellow can create a look that appeals to look visually pleasing and possibly stimulating an appetite. Some popular color palettes are vibrant citrus colors (orange, yellow, white), earthy colors (olive green, terracotta, cream) or cozy/moody (sage, beige, brown).
An example of this could be creating a street food magazine and using vibrant colors to create a sense of excitement. The use of vibrant colors can also match the vibe of street food since it explores different cultures and can be very colorful. Overall, the choice of colors can impact the mood of the magazine, so it is important to match the topic with colors like it or create that mood for the magazine.
Food Magazine Style Guide Conventions:
When discussing food magazines, some fonts like Isidora Sans, Chronica Pro Family, Solitas Slab, and more can be used. These fonts are typically under serif or sans serif but show a contrast from fonts in these groups. The magazine still follows the conventions of font size and spacing. As mentioned in the last paragraph, the colors used for a food magazine are usually warm tones or they match the mood of the topic of the magazine. Here is an example of 4 different magazine covers that follow a similar but different style guide.
In this example, we are looking at 4 versions of the same brand magazine. These 4 versions help in understanding style guides based on the overall mood of the magazine. One that sticks out to me is the 3rd version. This version has an image of vegetables in the shape of a heart. As for the color, the choice of a shade of green can create a mood of health or fresh natural ingredients.
The other version that stood out is the 4th version. This version has an image of a mix of berries in a brown basket. For the color of this title, it is darkish red. The color choice of red works since it matches the color of most of the berries in the basket which makes a correlation between the image and the text. This cohesiveness makes sure that the cover design looks good overall.
Overall, style guides help in making it stylish while also readable for the readers. They also tie into the layout design. They tie in with layout design by making the vision come alive through font choice, size, and color palette. So, both layout design and style guides work together but have differences that help create an artistic overall look.
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