Veerle's blog

Just about 2 months ago I posted about the design process of the logo for Scroll magazine. Today I’ll tell you a bit more about the general process of the design and layout of the magazine.

The briefing

The briefing was given based on the questions I asked Maxine, since this was her first magazine as well. Besides the look & feel I asked her about the content (see further below) and the necessary technical info I needed to exclude unexpected surprises.

Look & feel

As for the style and look I knew it should be timeless/classic, elegant, minimal, concise,... You can read all the info in my article about the logo design process.

Technical info

• Cover and inside pages all in full color (quadri/CMYK)
• Dimensions of magazine: 210 mm wide x 245 mm high
• Binding: perfect bound
• Thickness of spine: to be seen later
• Use bleed of 5 mm
• Files delivered as Certified PDF file: inside pages and cover plus spine as 2 separate PDF files
• Source files Adobe InDesign CS3

Content

I received some basic information about the content of the 64 pages. Real content would be available at the beginning of August. Information so far was enough for me to start working on some template pages:

The magazine's general content:

• Welcome - 1 page
• Table of contents - 1 page
• Last page column - 1 page
• Articles - 4 x 5 pages each = 20 pages
• Other cool stuff - 5 pages

Conference content:

• Conference program - 1 page
• Speaker bios and session descriptions - 14 pages

Advertising:

• Exhibitors - 12 pages
• Other sponsors - 4 pages
• Other advertisers - 4 pages

Later, I also received information about the word count of the articles and the different components of the different types of pages, such as, title, author with picture and bio, code samples, pull out quotes, headings (2 extra levels),... The cover art wasn't part of the scope, so it was only used to present something to the client. Maxine had the idea to work with a different theme per issue. The idea was to create different cover art per issue. It would be something that would reflect the theme of the magazine. So the cover of each issue will have a different illustrator, photographer or designer.

Initial design

To me it made more sense to show my client the logo designs together with the magazine cover and inside template layout, instead of showing them separately. After all the logo is part of the magazine, the logo *is* the magazine. It goes hand in hand. This way the client gets to see the whole package which, I believe, makes it easier to choose the right logo. The logo was my starting point to choose the typography, graphical styling and the grid.

Inspiration

Not sure if you remember, but around the time I began the design of this magazine, I published my article Inspiration series: Magazines. I browsed around a lot to get inspired to get started on Scroll magazine. After all, this was my very first magazine and, well, this was a productive blog post for me :) I was fed with info and ideas ready to turn them into practice.

Initial design proposals

Proposal 1

I chose for a clean modern style here and an all sans serif typographic styling. The table of contents was a bit of a question mark still. My idea was to split up the magazine in different sections, depending on the type of content. Each section would have a different color. I also decided to use 2 columns, with some white space on the outside of the pages. The third column would only be used for images and special quotes jumping out of the 2nd column.

Proposal 2

This proposal is only a variation on the first proposal as it uses the same basic grid. The section's color marking is different, so is the cover. The typography is also slightly different: the body copy uses a serif typeface, titles, subtitles etc.

Proposal 3

Still based on the same grid as proposal 1 and 2, I decided to use a combination of sans serif and serif typefaces, using only sans serif for bold text. I moved the pagination into the outside margins of the page, vertically aligned in the center of the page.

Feedback

John and Maxine preferred version 1, but had some remarks. First of all they preferred 1 column instead of 2 for easier reading among with some other details. The cover would not include theme of the issue, instead the inside cover spread would hold the text of theme.

Design revision

I reworked the design and created a few more template pages

'Editor's note' and 'Table of contents'

Example article pages

Example interview pages (wasn't included in final version) and 'Conference program' page

Example conference pages

This page uses a mirrored layout, which feels very well balanced. Unfortunately I couldn't put this one into practice. As you'll see in the real example page below I had to improvise to make it work with 2 speakers on the other page instead 5 on both pages. On another page there were 4 speakers for a session and also 2 speakers for a session. I worked with this mirrored effect: photo left, bio right and the next one, bio left, photo right... Each time I played with flushing the text left or right using the photo as the central element to align the text with. I also made sure I left enough breathing room between each speaker or session. Maxine gave me the freedom to decide how many words the bios and session descriptions should have.

The grid

Honestly, I do not have my calculator by hand and calculate the golden ratio for my layouts. I often base my layout on what I think feels right and balanced. This doesn't mean I don't use some kind of grid from the start. When I work in InDesign, the first thing I usually do is setting up my document's margins, columns and gutter.

Initially I used 8 columns and a 4 mm gutter, but this didn't give me enough options to play with. So I tried 10 columns with a 5 mm gutter. I chose a wider gutter because the 4 mm felt a bit too narrow for my linking. This way the images did have a bit more breathing room.

• Top margin: 17 mm
• Bottom margin: 20 mm
• Inside margin: 20 mm
• Outside margin: 14 mm
• 10 columns with a gutter of 5 mm

I always tend to make the inside margin a bit wider because you loose space in the fold. For the bottom I do the same because you need a bit of extra space for the pagination.

Tip

Here you can find an Adobe InDesign file with a grid system for an 8.5”x11” page that is divided into 12 columns and rows using the Rule of Thirds (Golden Ratio). Includes a 12pt baseline grid.

The typography

The choice of typefaces is very subjective. My preference tends to go towards sans serifs, though I like the combination of using both: serif for body and sans serif for titles and subtitles. I like the fact that Maxine wanted 1 full left page for the article's title, plus picture and bio of the author. It leaves a lot of white space, which is nice. Using a big light font weight seemed perfect for the article titles.

Typefaces I considered for the content:

• Avenir
• Fresco Informal Sans
• Scala
• Dyadis (for italic text)
• Matrix Script (for italic text)
• Perpetua
• Transitional 521

The final version uses Avenir in combination with Matrix Script for italic text.

The use of colors

The inside cover as well as the first recto page of the contents is a flat color spread holding a quote. The flat color is extracted from the cover art. Each issue will have its different color. The 'Editor's Note', the table of contents and last column page is also affected by the color of the issue. Furthermore I've used different colors for the main sections as I mentioned before.

Semacode

If you have a Scroll magazine, you might have noticed that at the end of each article you'll see a URL, plus a weird looking square. This is called a semacode. It was John's request to have these for each article. It's a way to encode URLs with your cellphone, if it has a built-in camera. I haven't tried this yet, so I'm not sure if and how it works.

Buy, follow and view

You can buy Scroll, or follow Scroll on Twitter or see some photos on Flickr.