Famous For My Dinner Parties: a food mag to savour

Magazines. Food. They're the same when you think about it. The content is what you need, but the appeal is in the presentation. Which is why the eclectic food mag Famous For My Dinner Parties turned to the multitalented designer Lind Haugaard to lay out its second issue. The result is a mouthwatering little A5 magazine that is big on passion, personality, and all-around pop.

"It's a magazine that celebrates, questions, and pokes fun at food culture – mostly through the lens of millennials, who obsess over what they eat while side-eyeing food trends," says Lind. "Think critical foodie meets Japanese expat watching their cuisine get slightly butchered by well-meaning Europeans. Yes, there's a right order in which to eat sushi!"

According to magazine lore, green covers don't shift on newsstands, but Lind isn't one to follow convention; besides, it's sold online. Inheriting the first issue's grids from Dirk Gössler of Büro Bum Bum, she has tuned up the typography, introduced a little more hierarchy and turned a googly-eyed Suprême Croissant from Lafayette Grand Bakery into a cover girl.

After all, eye contact can be an important element of cover design, and food with a face is one of the magazine's ongoing motifs.

"The masthead is super cartoonish, so I leaned into that energy with UVAS, a typeface by Nils Dam Nordlund, for the main cover hit," Lind continues. "The logo, image, and headline all got that glossy finish on the printed cover. With food fads in mind, this relates to grease, fat, and glossy sparkle."

Famous For My Dinner Parties was founded in 2020 by Junshen Wu, Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain and Yannic Moeken during COVID-19, initially as an online project. The title comes from a line in the 1977 film 3 Women, in which the character Millie (Shelley Duval) announces, "I'm famous for my dinner parties." In 2023, it became an annual print magazine, with each issue a collaboration between different writers, illustrators and photographers, all pulled together by an editorial designer.

With a background in brand design, Lind's approach was to give each feature its own identity. "I saw two options," she says. "Keep the design uniform or let each article shine. In a world of short attention spans, I figured, why fight it? Embrace the visual diversity. The illustrations, images, and typography have their own space. We tested out both options and honestly, making each article individually made more sense and made designing this way more fun."

On openers, you'll see headers breaking out of their blocks, running along curvaceous baselines with a few one-off typefaces alongside the magazine's usual display font, UVAS. The article 3 Women: A Matter of Taste and Time takes you back to the 1970s and needed a femme-fatale feel, so Lind selected ITC Benguiat; A is for Avocado brings a millennial vibe with Inter the chosen font; and for Food Forecast 2076, Lind selected Hobeaux – warm, silly and fun.

In line with Lind's philosophy, Famous For My Dinner Parties oozes creativity throughout. Illustrators Eilis Dart, Gemma Wilson and Anna Broujean have contributed imagery in their unique styles, along with the photographers Kenneth Lam and Tim Sonntag.

"I lean toward the more subcultural side of things," concludes Lind. "I like personality and diversity. I think the world has enough soulless, cookie-cutter brands. FFMDP is not one of them. It has life, purpose, and a real perspective, which is exactly what I love."

Famous For My Dinner Parties issue two is €10 from the magazine's online store.