The Architecture of a Magazine

By: Burkey Belser | 

By Burkey Belser 

I have never built my own home, but if I do I expect to be prepared for the task because I’ve worked with clients on similar projects—designing a magazine. Like designing the perfect home, there is a lot of money at stake but never enough money to satisfy all your dreams. The family’s basic human needs must be accommodated, but capturing its spirit is just as important. Designing a magazine demands close attention to discover both the needs and the essence.

To begin with, the designer must really get to know the organization and its people—their habits, their needs and their goals. An apt illustration is a recent association start-up magazine, Hospice.

Hospice, a grassroots movement that was born in the 1970s, has become part of mainstream healthcare. By giving terminally ill patients tender dignity during their final weeks of life, Hospice earned its own dignity among a sometimes rigid and suspicious medical community. By 1989, the 25,000 members of the National Hospice Organization needed a formal means of sharing thoughts with others who had survived the lonely adolescence of the movement. The natural conclusion was to develop a magazine—not a clinical journal—but a popular, friendly forum for a highly individualistic and special group of people uniquely capable of caring for life at the moment it meets death. So Hospice magazine began.

As designers, this background information is not extraneous. It is integral to the understanding and building of a vision that will become a magazine. To be successful, a trade magazine must capture all the enthusiasm its readers feel for their work. At its best, a magazine can lift them over the boredom of the daily routine and restore their vision. Imagine the struggle for vision felt by those whose every patient was sure to die—usually within three months. To be inspired, encouraged and proud demands a different outlook. The best trade magazines understand their reader’s goals—it is the inspiration that drives them.

As is familiar to many association magazines, Hospice had a tight budget and even tighter schedule. But in some ways these are critical to the success of any magazine. With more time to reflect, the difficulties of a start-up might become too discouraging; and with more money, the careful attention to every dollar can easily be lost.

The First Step
To build a book, plans must first be drafted for its “architecture,” sketching the flow of information throughout the magazine, as well as creating the layout of individual pages. This requires careful attention to several important issues:

• How do you want the reader to move through your magazine? The architectural metaphor is apt. A house greets visitors with a certain face, pauses with them in the front hall and guides them to the destinations of their visit. So, a designer must think about the style of cover design and the contents pages as though they were the initial entry points of a house.

• Second, the anticipated mix of advertising and editorial matter is important. A journal without advertising feels significantly different than a magazine that displays ads. Advertising is a plus for most readers. Man is the animal that shops. Most readers expect and appreciate ads. Scholarly journals can be dull as much because they lack ads as because of the dry academic style of most of their material.

• Finally, the graphic designer must consider the “living quarters,” where the reader will settle in to enjoy the magazine. The trade name is “editorial well.” Here the readers will spend their longest time with the feature articles, so these need to be designed for comfortable reading. You might say that the “departments” (letters to the editor and other recurring editorial elements) are rooms with special functions (kitchens, bathrooms or laundry rooms) where people spend less time, but where essential needs are met.

House Plans
There are only two basic floor plans for magazines. The more popular plan (found in Esquire, Playboy and The New Yorker, among many others) interleaves departments with ads in the first third of the book; and editorial well (i.e. editorial free of ads) occupies the middle third; and other departments (again, interleaved with ads) close the book. In this plan, reader interest continues throughout the pages.

Another format is represented by Vogue, where editorial takes a back seat to advertising and no apparent structure governs the reader's pace. Both plans have virtues.

To discover the architectural structure of a magazine, go through its pages, noting the placement of advertising and editorial elements. If you lay it down so that the issue spreads out in front of you in a line, with advertising below the line and the editorial above, you will reveal the blueprint of the magazine and know much more about its editorial and financial goals.

Similarly, as the physical structure for Hospice was developed, the editorial platform was refined—for instance, assigning topics to twelve departments that addressed the professional needs of the reader. Such as:

• Sources and Resources (new products, publications or services)

• Ideas at Work (ideas successfully implemented in hospice programs)

• Profiles (people who make a difference)

• Word of Mouth (a look at the lighter side)

• Washington Outlook (legislative agendas and updates)

Departments want visual distinction from feature stories, just as the kitchen is different from the bedroom. Why? Because the function is different for each room. A department is fast, and therefore all of the intellectual parallels of “fast” are possible here—e.g., short, fact bits, useful, light, clever, faddish—in general, ephemeral. To aid the reader in easily cataloguing the information, we gave Hospice departments a two-column grid—because we had already decided that the features would have a three-column grid. Often you find the two reversed; a two-column grid for features with three for departments. It doesn’t matter. Once readers understand your cues, they will use them. What does matter is that the cues are clear and unambiguous.

Ads
In Hospice, our decisions about editorial format affected the size of the ad spaces. Since we created an editorial well clear of ads, we knew that the ads would fall among the departments—either at the front or back of the magazine. Because the department format was two-column, ads would appear in quarter, half or full pages, but not in thirds. And we provided for full-page ads in the front half of the publication; partial ads fall to the back.

Designers are mindful of advertising as they work. We want our magazines to succeed, and therefore we will spend some time identifying sources of advertising, reviewing the contracts of representatives and encouraging the organizational structure that promotes advertising sales. If advertising is critical to the financial well-being of your magazine, don’t neglect it. Hire the salesperson as soon as you do the editor, knowing that the success of one depends on the other.

Beyond Structure to Design
“Tight budget” is often a euphemism for no photography beyond the editor’s own Leica and no illustration beyond whatever old engravings can be found. Such is the case with Hospice. So we turned to typographical design, a neglected resource for illustrative interest in design. Type can offer as much personality as any illustration. Good design, like good art, doesn’t require expensive materials; it demands creativity.

The selection of typeface creates a mood and subtle impression on the reader. We knew we needed a typeface that would convey the impression we intended, but would also bear up under the illustrative burdens we would place on it. For Hospice, we chose Bauer Bodoni for the headlines, subheads, bylines and folios. If you compare type to building materials, Bodoni is green Italian marble—it makes a statement. We matched it with Berkeley Old Style for the text because together they provided the overall page “color” we were looking for.

We chose to use circles as a dominant, recurring design element throughout the magazine. In hospice care, death naturally completes the cycle of life. So we used circles—in various forms—as graphic elements throughout the book, identifying folios, callouts and departments.

For example, to eliminate the frustrating and unnecessary task of finding page numbers, the folio is centered at the bottom of the page in an 18-point circle.

Small details often find themselves repeated in different forms in the complex design product that is a magazine. Our folios became the inspiration for the contents of the page. To indicate feature stories, we enlarge circles. Departments are distinguished by circular icons (illustrated in a strong style to hold their own with Bodoni).

Planning Saves Money
While creating the structure of the 32-page book, we kept cost in line by restricting the color to one 16-page signature. The other signature runs only in black. This reduces the printer’s prepress costs, stripping away at press time and press-inspection complications.

Properly planned, color held to one signature saves money without diminishing impact—and can actually give the impression of a four-color magazine throughout. In Hospice, process color is limited to half of the book. The impression is complete color occurs when we bind the signatures, giving us four-color in the first four pages, middle eight and last four—creating the illusion of an entire four-color publication.

Those who can afford only two colors in their magazine might consider running one signature in three-color and the other in black only. A magazine thus gains enormous flexibility and eliminates the monotony of page after page of the same two colors.

The Transition to Electronic Publishing
Desktop publishing has been swiftly accepted, more swiftly, in fact, than the technology can bear. Clumsy and slow, the early versions of desktop publishing software promised more than they delivered. But desktop publishing has come of age. Today’s software is efficient and fast, allowing the knowledgeable user to produce a finished magazine considerably faster by computer than by hand. Why? Not because design is faster or the initial layout is quicker—in fact, these processes are sometimes slowed by using the computer. But the mechanicals and corrections are about three times faster. Design changes in the position or appearance of images, or editorial changes in text are vastly simplified through computerization.

Each of the first three issues of Hospice has been produced in a different manner, improving each time. For the first issue, page makeup was created by a local typographer, using traditional phototype-setting. The second was produced electronically by the printer. The third issue was produced in our studio using Quark XPress on the Macintosh. Some say desktop publishing just trades one headache for another, but I would rather take aspirin for bits and bytes than for fumes of wax and glue.

Building and Rebuilding
The advantage that designing a magazine offers over designing a house is that you just don’t build it once. You build it over and over again, improving it with every issue. As Thomas Jefferson said of Monticello, “We are constantly tearing down, building and rebuilding.”