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Producing Successful Magazines and Newsletters

Magazine and newsletter design, style, format and production

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Before making decisions on how your magazine will look and how often it will come out, you should consider how it is going to be produced. If you have only a very small-scale publication, you may find it adequate to produce it yourself, using desktop publishing packages on your own computer or, if the magazine is very small, even a typewriter.

You can then do your own design and, when it is completed, you can print out and photocopy the pages and staple or spiral bind them. If, however, you are producing something more substantial, you will need to find suitable people, preferably professionals in the field, to work with you.You will also need to consider whether your magazine is to be published in print only, in print with a copy put up on a website, or an electronic version too.

The greater the range of methods, the more carefully you will need to think about design, and its co-ordination across the range of production.Many ‘do-it-yourself’ designers produce material that looks fussy and complicated. To avoid this, go for simplicity and consistency throughout the whole publication – following the guidelines presented in this chapter.

Style

Style covers all those elements which give your publication its own, unique character. A good way of discovering your own style is to generate a list of adjectives and see which ones feel right for you. Here are some examples of style adjectives:

Accessible, friendly, high-powered, professional, current, informative, factual, academic, influential, readable, light, weighty, entertaining, leading, down-to-earth, provocative, campaigning.

Do any of these appeal to you? If so, which; if not, which other words would you select to describe the style you have in mind?

Another way of choosing style is to look at other magazines and see which of them come across in a way that seems appropriate for your own. You can then identify the elements of that style and incorporate similar ones when you produce your own magazine. It is useful to keep a scrapbook or folder with design elements you find appealing, such as the typefaces and sizes, the number and range of columns to a page, the amount of ‘white space’ around text and pictures, the use of lines and borders, the way in which illustrations are placed and so forth.

Frequency

You will need to decide how often your magazine will appear. Weekly or monthly is common for magazines, but there are other options too, such as quarterly, bi-monthly, and so on. Factors you should take into account in deciding frequency include the time you have available to work on the magazine, the cost of production, the amount of material you need to gather and the frequency of publication of any competing magazines.

It is helpful to have a set publication date (for example, the first day of a month), so that readers, contributors and advertisers know when they will receive their copies or when their material will be seen by readers.

Format

Page Size

The size of your pages will affect the look of your magazine, its production cost and its readability. A large size may look impressive, but can be difficult for readers to handle and also difficult for them to scan with their eyes. Your magazine may also cost more to produce if you have a size that is not standard so that pages have to be cut down and offcuts wasted. A small size may seem economical, but may mean that your print size is very small and less readable – it may also look less enticing overall.

In the UK, standard A4 (297 × 210mm) size is easy and economical to produce so, if you are producing a low-budget publication, this may be the best one to select. As well as having standard size paper, it will also fit into standard size envelopes or polythene wrappers. Larger, or non-standard, sizes may require envelopes that are difficult to source or more costly to purchase and possibly more expensive to post. Also, many professionally produced advertisements are prepared in A4 size, or derivatives of this, so, if you wish to attract advertising, it is worth bearing this in mind.

In the US, American quarto (11? × 8.5?) is a common size; this is a little like the old UK quarto size (10' × 8? page).

Having said all this, non-standard sizes can work well – currently a best-selling UK publication is Glamour magazine, which is a very small, unusual, size – but easy to hold and fit into handbags.