Publishing your own journals is a very exciting but challenging process, especially if you don’t know where to start.
This guide will help you create your own magazines, from adapting templates to filling pages. Here you will find tips for designing covers and optimising your work for print, such as a health and efficiency magazine.
Getting started in the tutorial: Designing a magazine
Here, we’ll go through the steps involved in designing magazines for print, as well as general tips for making the publishing process easier for beginners.
Ready-made templates
If you’re a complete beginner, it’s best to use ready-made templates. Journal templates are essential and allow you to get on with designing your journal without having to wrestle with master pages, page numbers or header styles. Most templates are available in standard sizes and optimised for print, with CMYK colour swatches already set up for you, ensuring that you won’t have any headaches when exporting your work for print.
All you have to do is download the template, open it in Adobe InDesign and start editing by placing your images and text. You can make changes by changing fonts or colours to create different looks.
Creating your own template in InDesign
If you have little experience of using InDesign, creating your own magazine template can be a fun process, and will help you learn some technical aspects of publishing.
An InDesign template consists of a selection of pages for the inside content and separately for the cover.
The inner template consists of master pages that contain common elements such as page numbers and headers. Knowing the basics will make this easy to handle. Open the Pages panel (Window > Pages) in InDesign, click the A-Master icon at the top of the panel to bring up the wizard.
Designing a catchy cover
If you’ve ever watched The September Issue, you know how hotly debated the look of Vogue’s cover is before it goes to print Although details like background colour and announcement placement may seem unimportant to the uninitiated, they affect how a magazine with such a cover will sell.
The first thing the reader pays attention to is the cover, so it’s important that it’s eye-catching and attractive. Here are three tips for making sure your cover design is as effective as possible:
– Use an interesting photograph or illustration on a large scale, or better still, use photos of people looking directly into the camera. This gives the impression of contact with the model, attracts in the browser and suggests picking up the magazine off the shelf.
-Control the font hierarchy by setting a large display font for the magazine title and reducing its size for subheadings and article titles with different styles, such as italics, along the left and right edges. Stick to a maximum of two fonts on the cover to create a professional look and not confuse the eye.
-Use a colour palette that is simple and appealing to today’s audience, look for trending colours on websites such as Pinterest and Behance. Achieve contrast between background colour and/or photo and font to make the text as clear as possible, even from a distance.