Why, When and How to Redesign Your Magazine

Since it is unique, it is misleading to look at someone else’s before/after redesign, try to figure out what they did and why they did it, and then attempt grafting bits of it you “like” onto your own pub. It doesn’t work. You have to dig deeper.

Why do it? Define your reasons.

* Is your magazine looking a bit dated when compared to its direct competition? When the competition is gaining, it forces you to look at yourself, and that is always a good thing. Don’t compare yourself to all the glamorous stuff on the newsstands—you’re bound to get depressed. Designers do that and no wonder they are frustrated.

* Were you a bit embarrassed when your airplane seatmate insisted on seeing your product, and you felt the need to explain? Is the seatmate already your subscriber or a potential one? If so, pay attention. If not, who cares?

* Are you sure you are losing market share because your product compares shabbily with the others? A “design” is merely the outward skin that covers a multitude of sins. Changing it may achieve nothing but a temporary camouflage, if what is inside continues rotting.

* Can you be sure that a magazine page torn out and hung on the wall by itself is from nobody else’s magazine but yours? Don’t be surprised. Constant tinkering in every issue has imperceptibly altered what your “style” may have started out as. Maybe all you need is a spring cleaning.

Don’t … (you have been warned)

The following do’s and don’ts can help you avoid common blunders in the redesign process and also offer you some helpful guidance for the next time you redesign.

* Don’t expect that redesigning can solve any other problems than visual character.

* Don’t redesign because you are bored with the product. Redesign only when you have a new editorial policy or new publishing technique. Or you need an infusion of fresh energy … or the sales people are trying to impress ad agencies … or you are trying to appeal to a new group of subscribers.

* Don’t redesign to show off how clever and with-it you all are. Avoid artificial exaggeration just to be “creative.” By all means be inventive, but worthwhile originality grows out of the special circumstances dictated by the needs and the materials at hand. Again, if you can define your real problems or purposes clearly, then the solution is probably staring you in the face.

Who will do it?

* Don’t attempt to do it in-house. Even an expert surgeon can’t take out his own appendix. Turn to a seasoned professional. The investment will pay off with new approaches, because the outsider doesn’t know all those reasons why not, which impede original thinking within the staff. It also skirts around intramural politics, which can complicate the simplest strategies. Professionals perform two functional services in one.

1) They devise active means to catapult stuff off the page into the reader’s mind fast and effectively. 2) They fashion a vehicle that can happen consistently from front-to-back, so the periodical as a whole gains a recognizable position in the marketplace. That is a very difficult assignment that demands a broad, experienced view only tangentially “artistic.” It deserves to be expensive.
* Do avoid the glamorous young recent graduates who stun you with their portfolios. You don’t just want embellishment to make you look good, you are paying for tactics to improve your product in the marketplace. That’s very different from “design” and weird typefaces and color layers. The right magazine redesigner is a management consultant, not a page decorator.

Picking your consultant

* Do explain in as much detail as you can what you and the editors “need” and why—so the redesigner can solve for deeper purposes than merely dressing up the product more fashionably. Try to decide whether he/she shows genuine interest in what your magazine is trying to accomplish editorially, so it can succeed better in the business marketplace.

* Do try to sense whether they are likely to use your product to build monuments to themselves, or whether they are professional enough to make the product worthy of a monument to itself. Watch out if the samples they show are stylistically similar to each other; you want a solution custom-tailored to your needs, not a formula.

* Do look for someone oriented toward flow rather than one-shot effects. The right redesigners will proudly display whole stories in their portfolios, instead of only single-page units or spreads. Those are fine for ads, but not for magazine-making, because the advantage of publications is that they are multi-page products, and that is what the redesigner ought to concentrate on.

They should submit complete issues and explain how their design scheme helped to fulfill editorial purposes. Not design-purposes, but business purposes. That’s the secret.

* Do hire redesigners who communicate well in words. They are likely to be sympathetic to writers, instead of thinking of type as that dull, grey stuff. They will be more than page decorators. Besides, they must persuade the team to understand and sign on enthusiastically to use their new scheme. That demands verbal skills.

Practical tips for the redesign

* If you don’t carry advertising that dictates standardized sizes, do change shape: 8 1⁄2 inches by 11 inches is boring, but most economical. Trimming down saves paper and postage, but there may be a sales advantage to a different shape that is worth discussing with the printer. Go taller, like the metric A4 size, or widebody, 9 inches by 12 inches. But bigger is more expensive, so its value may be questionable. Six inches by 9 inches is efficient paper use. Five and three-eights inches by 7-1⁄2 inches fits in the pocket and is good for heavy text.

Tabloid size is hard to handle: It is too big to be small, too small to be big. With a standard size, you can see an open spread within your circle of vision all at one time. So you can make use of that entire width and height to create a huge impression. The tabloid is too large to take in at one glance—it requires holding at a distance to take it all in, and when you do, that distance is so great that you can’t read the text. It is beyond the comfort zone. On the other hand, it is too small to warrant folding (like a broadsheet newspaper). It has the advantages of neither, except that it can accommodate island halves with runaround edit.

* Do count the number of fonts used for all the “display,” i.e., attention-getting wording. No wonder the magazine looks like a fancy costume party. Hang the pages on the wall in sequence and see how the editorial spaces blend with the ads. The ideal number of fonts to give the spaces under your control their visual character: one.
The logo and department headings are interconnected serial signals that must echo throughout the issue. Each is a link in a chain of impressions and an integral part of your graphic personality. They should also be styled in conjunction to fit with the display typography.

* Do let the logo stand out on the cover in its own clean space, without surrounding visual clutter. Make the inescapable small stuff smaller, so the logo looks bigger by contrast. Separate it from the other cover words by ample space.

* Do establish and follow a consistent style for all charts, graphs and diagrams. Non-text elements are always glanced at first, and therefore they are a major part of the visual character-creating continuum. In that sense, they are closely allied to the look of the logo, department headings and display type.

* Do devise a styling for—and stay consistent in—everything that repeats on the pages. When you are examining those pages on the wall, count the different ways each of those elements is handled. Look at the display type, text type, cutlines, headings on boxes, bylines, bios, credit lines and photo credits.

Variety is bad because it disintegrates the visual effect of your product. Consistency and similarity are vital factors of a redesign whose essence is simplification.

* Do establish a two-tiered color palette. Same as with type fonts, the fewer hues you use, the better. Less really is more. Instead, think of tone values. You want a strong, powerful handling of foreground (for attention-getting splashes) and a paler, more subtle handling of neutral backgrounds (for boxes, tint areas, to go with color photos, etc.). Base your standardization on that editorial/functional need.

In fact, all decisions on redesign must be deliberate, logical and purposeful. The interesting thing is that when you have thought it through that way, whatever you do is also likely to be pleasing to the eye. You never start out trying to please the eye, because it is too superficial. That comes as a result of all the other thinking.