What's the name of this magazine layout technique?

April 20, 2016 1:43 PM

This is an example of what I'm talking about. What's that thing called?

I associate this technique with interior magazines (though I'm sure I've seen it in other contexts too). A two-page spread. One page is a photo containing lots of beautiful objects you might want to covet. Neighbouring that is a monochrome line drawing showing numbered outlines of each item in the photo. Then there's a numbered text blurb for each item.

posted by pdinnen to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

The act of laying things out that way is called "knolling." The practice was started in a furniture design firm, so I imagine the monochrome drawings harken to that.
posted by xyzzy at 2:08 PM on April 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'd call it something like a "numbered silhouette photo legend". I associate it with labeled group photos.
posted by zamboni at 2:08 PM on April 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: "knolling" is beautiful but not exactly what I'm looking for. The important piece I need is the illustrated outline that acts as the legend to the objects in the photo.

"numbered silhouette photo legend" seems like a great search phrase but doesn't seem to get the results I'm looking for.
posted by pdinnen at 2:21 PM on April 20, 2016

Coming at this with a tech background, the silhouette version looks like something that could be produced by an image processing algorithm like edge detection.
posted by books for weapons at 2:25 PM on April 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Here's a paper that uses the term "picture legend." (I work in magazines, and I'm unaware of standard term for this.)
posted by neroli at 2:31 PM on April 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

When I worked at a fashion magazine a few years ago, this was called a "catalog call out" or "gift guide" layout, but it was rare to have a vaguely hand illustrated legend like the one you linked to in addition to product photos unless it was for a special feature. This may have been internal nomenclature, though, and I feel like the illustrated legend bit is more of a recent phenom that style bloggers use. More examples of second-legend-less layouts here.
posted by Hermione Granger at 2:46 PM on April 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Tantalizingly close in some of these wonderful answers but still not quite exactly what I have in mind. Perhaps the not great example I linked doesn't help my cause. Here's a cleaner example of the technique, this time applied to a group photo (hover to switch back and forth between photo and illustration).
posted by pdinnen at 2:51 PM on April 20, 2016

It also is described as a "Group photokey", "picturemap" or "Picture legend"

https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~brown/pdf/eg2012_picture_legend.pdf
posted by nickggully at 3:07 PM on April 20, 2016 [7 favorites]

I don't know the industry jargon, but "photograph with key" is how I would describe it.
posted by Bruce H. at 3:17 PM on April 20, 2016

I associate this with museum displays, if that helps.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:57 PM on April 20, 2016 [2 favorites]