Making a magazine: Introduction - InDesign Tutorial

- Get out your pencil and make some notes. If you're making a new magazine, or reworking an existing one, and trying to work out a look, it may help to ask the following questions: I want to emphasize that you're going for a unique voice. You're working to a vision, so you want to avoid creating a facade. Just to look off the shelf; maybe something you've done before, or from a template, or something you just make up. If your collaborators, the publisher, the editors, the writers can't articulate that vision for you, do everything you can to hang in until you have one. You as a designer can play an important role here. So, questions: Is your magazine mostly serious, or entertaining? If it's serious, is it introvert, or extrovert? If it's entertaining, is it quiet and dry, or loud and showy? Do you and your audience know each other? This would usually be the case with a small, closed group, a club, an organization, a school, a professional network. Similar would be an indie magazine. A small art, or special interest magazine, a single copy or direct subscription. You probably share insider language or jargon, or experience. The third kind is a general broadcast magazine going out to the newsstand, goes to the public, it's a mainstream magazine, and you probably do not know that audience. Do you expect words to do the heavy lifting, or pictures? In other words, are you leading with words, or leading with pictures? Do you expect the pages to be dense, or light? A dense can come across as intense, and full, and having gravitas and authority. On the other hand, dense can feel forbidding, or somber, or dull. Light can be airy, and quiet, and pretty. It can also feel incomplete, or trivial, or even wasteful. Which way it goes will depend on the adroitness of your design. Lots of short articles and pictures, or just a few long ones? Or a mix? A variety of topics, or mainly just one, or a few? How will your magazine be printed? Offset, digital? Can images bleed? This will affect the design. And how will it be delivered? Will it be picked up, or sent through the mail? Periodicals rate as the lowest of all postal rates, but there are strict requirements, and weight will still matter, which may limit your pages. In addition, when you're building a magazine, you have so many visual tools and techniques to work with. Tools of type. Some typefaces are neutral, and work with almost everything. Others are specific to subject or mood. You have high contract versus low. Heads, subheads, kickers, deckheads, callouts, text, bylines, captions, legends, sidebars, folios, footnotes, on and on. There is the grid. Two columns, three columns, four columns, 12 columns, asymmetrical columns, wide margins, narrow margins, asymmetrical margins, horizontal hang lines. There's the page itself. There's a tall page, a square page, a wide page, and what happens when they're doubled; meaning opened? You have tools of layout. Mixed pages, single pages, double pages, super sized type, big pictures, small pictures, clustered pictures, rectangular pictures, pictures in silhouette, pictures that bleed, or don't. There's illustration. You have graphical devices, lines, borders, circles, boxes, arrows, flags, colors, flat panels. You have techniques for keeping things apart, and techniques for bringing things together. You can have pictures and text interacting, or separate It's endless. So what I'm going to do for the remainder of our time to deal with some of this is go through one complete magazine. There are so many amazing magazines that I want you to see. I would love to show them to you. I left hundreds of pages back at my desk, but for this course we have to focus on the basics. So we're going to look at a magazine that's very simple.