By: Sir Khalid Rehman
You Can Bring Out Your Own Magazine
Be a magazine editor/publisher. Learn the ropes and try bringing out your own magazine. If you have have no experience, learn from others’ experience. When publishing a magazine for the first time you may make a few technical mistakes. To avoid them, learn some basics and attempt a try.
Get Inspired
Get a few magazines that you like. Go through them and try to find why you liked them at first sight. Why would anyone else find them eye-catching? Why would a general reader want to find in a magazine? What a music buff wants in a magazine he or she would buy? The photos? The layout? The subject of the magazine? What other element would a person would like to see in a magazine and like it so much as to buy it?
Pick out the elements you like in other magazines to inspire your magazine's layout. Make a list of those elements.
The Size
What size would you like to your magazine to be? A general readership magazine is okay in size A4. A pictorial magazine may need to be in tabloid size for a good display. The size may be different too.
The Paper
Art paper makes the glossies. Matte-finish paper lends sophistication to your up-class magazine or journal. Simple offset may be more practical for a general readership periodical. Then you have a choice of newsprint, white newsprint, rice paper (which does not have any rice in it). The title cover is usually printed on a heavier paper than the inside pages. Different papers have different weights, qualities and prices; and hence used accordingly.
Make Your Masthead Attractive
Your magazine’s masthead is its face—the first thing that anyone would see and get impressed. How would you like it to look? Attractive or mediocre? Exciting or sobre? Simple or elaborate? It projects the kind of image of your magazine.
At the newsstands, it must stand out. Only its top two to three inches will show. Does that area lock in the reader’s attention? Test your magazine by printing out the cover and putting another magazine in front with only the top of the masthead showing. Now look at it from across the room to know how it will appear to passersby.
Your magazine’s cover design will be fighting the other covers for attention. A well-designed masthead visually attracts the buyer to choose one magazine over others in its category.
Use a Great Cover Photo
Don’t try to save a few bucks on the cover. A well-designed cover can get your magazine noticed and, even more importantly, picked up. Hence all cover photos must be of good, high quality one (watch for colors and resolution).
Choose a photo that is interesting to your potential readers or which tells a story. Showing the unexcited face of an unknown person will not do much to get the potential customer to reach for your magazine. Choose a photo that is recognizable to your target readers or shows action, unusual colors, taken from unusual angles, or combinations of all these.
Remember, your magazine only gets one chance to make its first impression. Photos are powerful in making a good first impression.
Careful Font Usage
The choice of fonts can have a major impact on the overall professionalism a magazine conveys. Using too many font faces is visually confusing to the reader. He/she may have trouble distinguishing the stories from the ads. Not to mention that too much "stuff" can be tiring on the eyes.
Consider using only one to two font families in your articles; one for the headlines and subheads, one for the body text.
Research shows that serif fonts, especially small ones, are easier to read than san-serif fonts (serifs are the little tick marks at the end of lines in the letters). The eye tracks across the serifs of the letters making reading easier.
ALL CAPS are difficult to read. If you want to emphasize a word consider using bold versions of that font as an alternative. Stretching/compressing fonts look awkward. Consider the extended or condensed version of that font or even another font family.
Multi-column Layouts
One trick for having your stories look professionally built is to use a multi-column grid to the page. For regular-size magazines, try using three columns, for digest size use two columns. Not only does it look more professional but the text will flow better on the page and you will have more options for placing photos.
White Space Looks Good
Although it can be difficult, consider leaving some areas of the page blank. Stuffing as much as you can onto a page is visually overwhelming to the reader. Experiment with leaving some column white space in your new multi-column layout. Try running text in one of the columns only with a photo or graph covering the other two columns. Try starting your article halfway down the page with the top half being reserved for a photo. Experiment - computers make that easy.
Stay Away from the Edge
Don’t try to fill up the entire space. A quarter inch margin is the minimum that should be there but even half an inch or more will look good. It looks more professional to add more white space.
Use Quality Visuals
You are selling the story to the reader who has not read the story yet. With the first page of the article the reader decides whether to read on. Unattractive or cheap-looking layout and visual make the entire story unattractive, and there is a good chance the reader will not read the article.
Of course it should have relevance to the article and its subject.
. . . And Other Content
The topics should be relevant, revealing and too interesting. They must be well written and perfectly edited.
The Essentials Too
The editorial, readers’ letters and opinions are as important as they articles. Do not forget the list of contents. Photo features make a magazine more interesting. You can also add some DIY articles too as regular content.
Have questions... Ask here
Have questions... Ask here
