House rules

Never ship

diagonal candy / hazard stripe

coloured left-border accent bar

Why: the candy stripe reads as decoration for its own sake, and the left-border bar reads as machine-generated. Neither belongs to the magazine.

Use instead

masthead band → 3px double rule

section-header fill → 1px hairline

stub / separator → 1px dotted

tile texture → horizontal 1px scanline

Why: rules are the newspaper idiom — they separate without ornamenting, and they hold up at every width and in both schemes.