bon appétit botox

If the internet is essential to modern life, the lower-case phenomenon in logos embodies that direction. Next month, Bon Appétit Magazine will unfurl a new logo, and a willingness to complete with successful and more youthful brands like Real Simple and Martha Stewart Living. The logo has been stripped of it's severe capitals, and replaced by a softened Baskerville-ish font, looking to skew younger than the magazine's typical 50-something reader. In fact, using lower-case type to redefine an established brand might suggest something more specific for the 21st century: a deference towards the web. 

A visit to bonappetit.com bares little fruit (recipes), except an important link to epicurious.com on the masthead. Epicurious.com has been successful at funneling recipes from Conde Nast's empire to form an ironclad cooking resource. It's hard to deny the dominance of web-based recipe searching; so why not try to make that same suggestion in a title? The dot.com of the new bon appétit (lower-case now) must be lurking somewhere in the masthead. Even treatments on this cover image suggest elements of the internet: the backslash after "YEAR", the brown bubble that could be a mouse rollover.

Does this make the magazine a companion piece to the web? When I use recipes found online, the end result of this effort is not reading directions from a laptop, but from a sauce-stained printout. Cooking requires a recognition of the tactile qualities of things; a magazine can serve as a trivet or spoon rest while being read in a kitchen. At best, bon appétit might have made itself a visual consort to the now ubiquitous internet. Where do you start your search for a recipe, and what is that recipe's end form?