BEST DESIGN TIPS TO START A MAGAZINE

BE CONSISTENT

Even if your choice is to break every rule, there has to be a logic behind your choices as a designer. Consistency is not about using similar fonts or layouts throughout the publication; it is all about creating your own personal logic and following it.

In fact, today´s designer´s are creating their own fonts to match the tone, look or topic of a page, so, as long as you have a clue, the magazine´s readers will do as well.

MIND YOUR AUDIENCE

The look of a magazine will make it appealing to a certain audience and unappealing to another. When people often think that it is the content that defines the audience and the design not so much, but people see before they stop to read. If your magazine looks like something that wouldn´t interest them, people will look the other way. It is ALL about first impressions, which brings us to the cover.

DOMINATE THE COVER

The cover is the key element of magazine marketing. This is where most of your designing efforts should go. Your cover design has to be aligned with the magazine´s vision, and it has to use a combination of (short) text and images that is striking, smashing, beautiful, modern, shocking, groundbreaking; in short, it has to be DRAMATIC.

Here is a good example of using a combination of text and images that create great drama. Of course, you don´t need war or danger to create drama. Drama can be in a face and a title, drama can be in a combination of a texture and a font and a certain topic. 

Your goal is to have people not being able to look away from your magazine cover. In terms of photography, you should always go for photos that don´t only look good but also tell a story. If it tells only part of an exciting story, people will be compelled to pick up the magazine, in order to get the rest of that story.

MASTER THE CONTENT-DESIGN DYNAMIC

If you get an article of a million words, and you are asked to create a layout, without any chance of reducing the text, chances are, the text will look crammed into the page. Working closely with the editors means negotiating word counts and spaces as you go. Today, the trend is to leave a lot of white space around text; it creates a cleaner look, and it makes articles easier to read.

In order to make the design of the inside pages of your startup magazine flow, you need to master the dynamic between design and content.

DON¨T UNDERESTIMATE PRINTING

Your most fabulous design efforts will be lost, unless the people at there choice knows what they are doing. When you design professionally, every nuance in color shades, every variation in paper counts.

Your safest bet is to advice your employer to hire only the best printing company and then work closely with them during the mockup and proofing phase to ensure optimum quality.

MIND YOUR COLOR SCHEME

The trend today is to use basic colors from the spectrum of light. Basic colors can make a bold statement. 

I love this grayscale example from CHROMATIC magazine. Simple fonts, simple and perfect composition, text that combines with photo to tell a story, some headlines that create mystery and might excite your curiosity, i.e. Lowercase People; all of this elements combine to make a simple yet powerful cover. 

BE CREATIVE

Thinking outside the box always pays. In the example I am showing you, Hungarian designer Miklos Kiss thought more like “inside the bag.” This totally reminded me of Kramer´s idea about a coffee table book that turned into a coffe table on the TV show Seinfeld. In the case of LACK magazine, the concept was executed beautifully. The magazine becomes both an objet d´art with a sleek modern design, and a practical handbag. As a woman, I can totally appreciate this one.

I´m not saying that you have to create magazines that transform into something else; I am only saying that the more you let your imagination fly, the better.

USE FONTS CREATIVELY

To finish up,  an examples of using fonts to your best advantage, also from LACK magazine.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF GREAT ILLUSTRATION

This is my last example, also from LACK. The composition, the illustration and the creative use of fonts make for one of the coolest index pages I have ever seen.

As you can see, starting a magazine is no piece of cake, but it can also be one of the most challenging and fulfilling projects a designer can take on. 

Author Bio:

Veronica is a filmmaker and rather eclectic writer living in Montevideo, Uruguay.