Magazine design plays an important role in creating a publication. If you are thinking about producing a magazine, you are entering a crowded market. Don’t you know that in 2016 there were over 7000 magazines in circulation in the United States? You will need your magazine design to be of the highest quality if you want your publication to stand out.
Thankfully there are a number of tricks you can use to give your magazine the edge and make it look truly stunning. And if your design is awesome, it will help it to stand out from the busy crowd.
Learn more with these 9 great tips for incredible magazine design.
1. Nail the Cover
Don’t judge a book by its cover, they say. But when it comes to magazines, that’s exactly what people will do.
The key to standing out from the crowd is having a cover that really grabs people’s attention. But grabbing attention doesn’t mean it has to be packed with content or brash colors. An understated but stylish cover can have just as much impact.
The majority of successful covers follow the same format. One main heading, one key sub-heading usually focussing on a particular story, and then a number of smaller sub-headings. This gives an overview of the key stories as well as more in-depth look at what else is in the magazine.
2. Don’t Ignore the Contents Page
Probably the most important page after the cover is the contents page. It’s usually the first page that readers will turn to inside the magazine.
If you’ve got a lot of content in your magazine, packing it all onto one page is going to make it hard to read. There’s no harm at all in spreading your contents page out to two or even more pages.
Most content pages usually follow a fairly standard grid format but you can get a bit creative with this to stop it looking stale. Emphasising your stronger stories is a great way to give a flavor of your content at a glance.
3. Be Clever with Color
Color is a sure-fire way to make your magazine stand out. But you need to use it wisely.
A mix of bright, well-matched colors can really make a page pop. But by the same token, a minimal use of perhaps just a single color can also make a page look incredibly classy.
What you don’t want to do is just use a mess of color just for the sake of it. Take your time to choose your palette and use color to enhance the content, rather than detract from it.
4. Insert Infographics
Images and text are the building blocks of any magazine. But combining them in infographics can really give your content some punch.
Most pages of your magazine either feature images, blocks of text, or both. A page or even double page spread that breaks up this pattern by using an infographic is going to immediately catch the reader’s eye and therefore their attention.
Infographics are a great way of imparting complex information for what would otherwise be a very text-intensive article. They make the ideas easier to absorb and there is a whole range of styles you can use.
5. Focus on Fonts
Nice colors and clever infographics are important, but at the end of the day, the majority of your magazine content is going to be text.
Choosing the correct fonts can make a massive difference to the quality of your magazine design. The key thing to remember is that your headlines and body text don’t have to be in the same font. Combining a stylish serif font for your headlines, with a modern sans-serif for the body text can have a really powerful impact.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that the font of your body text needs to be easy to read.
6. Grab Their Attention with Pull Quotes
Much like your cover gives a glimpse of what is in the magazine, pull quotes can be used to give a flavor of what is coming in the articles.
A pull quote is a quote taken directly from the article that is presented in a much larger font than the body text. It can even be given its own page if the impact of such a statement is worthy of the content. By choosing pull quotes that will really pique the interest of the reader you can suck them into articles they might not otherwise read.
The design of your pull quotes can have a strong impact, so it’s definitely worth putting some effort into these.
7. Be Consistent Throughout
Once you’ve found a style that works for you, stick to it.
There is little more jarring than a mish-mash of styles within the same magazine. This means that everything from the page numbering style to the typography and background colors should follow the same style. This gives your magazine its identity and makes it more comfortable to read.
8. Make Your Type Look Beautiful
Choosing great fonts is important, but so is making sure that your text is perfectly laid out.
Aligning all of your text in your articles is vital for giving your magazine a professional feel. If the text in one column is slightly out of line with the next, readers will pick up on it, even subconsciously. It makes your magazine look unprofessional, and is very easy to fix.
Crowding too much text into a small space is also a surefire way to turn readers off. Remember that readability is key.
9. Make Use of White Space
Whilst content is obviously the most important thing on the page, it needs room to breathe.
Try to keep away from the desire to fill every page from top to bottom. Leaving white space not only makes your design look stylish but helps to draw the eye to the content you want your readers to be focussing on. Too much going on can be quite offputting.
More Great Tips for Stunning Magazine Design
We hope you have found these 9 tips for incredible magazine design useful.
If you would like to learn more, then please do take a look at our blog. It’s packed with useful articles to help you produce the very best magazine as well as other really useful tips and hints for your business.
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