Design

Paper Colour

White is conventional, but it is possible to print on different coloured papers. Coloured paper may well make production more expensive and it may not photocopy well, which could be an issue for you if you need to take copies of particular pages from time to time. You could choose to have white as your main colour, but have a section of the magazine in a coloured paper, but this may make it more expensive to produce. An alternative to coloured paper is to use a coloured ink, which can be applied as a background colour, or tint, to some pages, to give the appearance of different coloured sections.

Even if you decide on white, there are many ‘shades’ of white, so it is worth looking at what is available before deciding which will be most suitable for you. And if you have other printed items to go out with the magazine – for example, compliment slips or letterheads, then you may want to try to get them all to match up. This can be much harder to achieve than you might think so, if you are starting from scratch, it is probably best to select the magazine paper first and then fit the other, less expensive, items around it.

Print Colour

Black on white is most conventional, but there are other options. If you print in only one colour then choosing a dark shade – blue, green, purple, magenta or brown for example – will allow you to use tints of that colour for illustrations or for background colour. If you did this with black, then all your illustrations would be shades of grey, which would not be as appealing on the whole. And if you selected a lighter colour in which to print, it would not show up as well on white paper, making it all more difficult to read and probably a bit insipid to look at.

It is also possible to print with ‘reversed-out’ lettering, so that the print is lighter than the background, as in white on black. Reversed-out lettering tends to be harder to read, however, so it is generally not a good idea to have large expanses of it.

You can also use ‘spot’ colour – one or more single colours to brighten up or highlight the text – or full colour, which gives the most flexibility to your illustrations. Each of these processes will add to your printing cost, so you need to make sure your budget is sufficient if you use anything other than single colour printing.

Number Of Columns

Another design element is the number of columns to a page. Having your type go right across a full page can make it very hard to read – it is easier to scan a narrower column width. Magazines often have two columns a page for articles and three for news. It is possible to have more than three columns per page but, unless you have an extra large format, this may look very ‘busy’. A bit of variety in the number of columns is useful to add interest to your magazine, but you should not overdo this if you want it to look good. You should also remember that your column widths may determine the width of your illustrations, unless pictures deliberately take up different widths, with the text being wrapped around them. See illustrations on opposite page.

Print Type And Size

It is usually best to use one main typeface for most of your text. Different typefaces give different ‘characters’ to publications so, if you are not knowledgeable about this and you intend producing the magazine yourself, it is worth speaking to a designer about this particular element before you begin. An interesting aspect of typefaces is that many people believe that, if you are scanning documents into your computer, it can be easier for the machine to recognise fonts without serifs (typefaces with ‘clean lines’, rather than little squiggly bits in the letters). And some people believe that ‘clean’ fonts are easier for dyslexic readers to cope with. So there are various reasons for selecting one typeface rather than another and it is an area to which it is worth paying attention.

Most of this book has been set in a ‘serif’ typeface (Garamond) and in 11 point size. This paragraph, however, is set in a ‘sans serif’ typeface (Arial), although still in 11 point size. Very large or very small typesizes are harder to read than average size ones and 12 point is a commonly used size in publications.

When you use a 10 point size, particularly in a typeface that seems small – this sentence is an example of Times New Roman in 10 point – reading is likely to be more difficult.



And with a larger size (this sentence is Arial in 14 point), you will get much less text to a page, although it can look good for design purposes to use this kind of size in selected areas.

And emboldening print, as in this sentence (still 14 point but bold) makes the text stand out much more – the previous sentence is not bold, although its large size makes it appear so.

Finally, italics also stand out from ordinary type and can be useful to emphasize words or ideas and the space between lines (leading) can be varied to give different effects – the leading in this paragraph has been increased.