How to Layout a Magazine or Newspaper

Page Layout Designs and Tips for Newspapers and Magazines

While outsourcing page layout and ad design is becoming popular with many publisherstoday, it is still important to understand some of the key factors underlying good newspaper ormagazine design. This article offers some summary pointers if for nothing more than to help youcommunicate better with your designer.

PAGE LAYOUT FOR YOUR NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES

Objects

In an average 32-page newspaper or magazine there are 500+ ‘objects’, or elements,including article title, author, image, caption, text, category/section, page numbers, publicationdetails, masthead, banners, ads and more.

Every publisher’s nightmare is seeing a missing ad, a wrong caption under an image or spellingmistakes. The best way to avoid these traps is to manage your content well throughout yourproduction cycle using a good CMS, or Content Management System. Only 4 years ago a CMSwas out of reach of most internet users, tending to be exclusive to big media companies withdeep pockets. Websites were run by techs and any updates to anything at all required a goodunderstanding of website technology.

Today 100’s of good CMS’s abound, some still excessively priced, but many free! WordPress isthe world leading CMS and a great tool to help you manage your publishing content. Not onlywill it let you get your content up their quickly without hassle, it will also keep it all together, sothat even 2-years later you (and your readers!) can find an article or image via a simple search. So, all content should always be ‘online-first’, don’t hoard it in buried Word docs with separatefolders for images etc. You will only end up with a train-wreck come press time.

Publishing Layout Software

There are some great tools on the market, including free and commercial license products. Seea comparative table of desktop publishing software. Of the open source free publishingsoftware, we think Scribus is the best for page layout and Gimp for graphics. In the commercialspace, Adobe Indesign, Illustrator and Photoshop are quite simply the leaders. EzyMedia usesthe Adobe Suite.

Obviously the simpler the system you choose to learn, the more reduced your options. Certainlyif you are new to publishing and considering purchasing the Adobe Suite, we would stronglyrecommend you save those dollars until the business is up and running and in the meantime outsource your page layout. Even an experienced publisher with a full team spends around $35– $50 per page on layout, once their graphic designer’s time, holidays and other overheads areconsidered.

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EzyMedia offers page layout services from $25 per page – all you have to do is load yourarticles into our publisher portal and provide real-time commentary as the pages are produced. If you use an EzyMedia Website, our graphics team can export your articles from the backend,meaning the one and only time you ever handle content is when you (or your contributors) firsttype it into your website. Sit back and relax!

Design

This is the crux of your publishing business. If your newspaper or magazine looks bad, readersand advertisers will not look beyond an amateur cover design. You might have the best content,an enviable distribution model that gets your publication in front of potentially 1000’s ofeyeballs, but it will fail if your design sucks.

Important elements your newspaper or magazine design should consider include:

Colours – just like a good outfit for a Saturday night, you must bring together the rightcombination of colours to stand out for the right reasons. You can visit plenty of colour swatchwebsites and even your Microsoft Word has suggested colour combinations under Page Layout>> Colors. Probably a good idea not to stray too far from recommended combinations in theseearly days.

Typography – professional designers are always updating their knowledge in this area, someeven specialise in typography alone! This is a vast area, too extensive for this synopsis. Sufficeto say, keep your font clean, well-spaced, readily legible and relevant to your brand/stories.Don’t use more than 3 different fonts on any one webpage or more than 5 fonts on a tabloidsize print/digital newspaper page. Don’t distract the reader with overly difficult or plain silly font.Don’t try to be too clever, but do have some fun. If you are writing for an elderly audience, uselarger font and spacing.

Left justified wider columns for easier reading, block narrow columns for hard-hitting ‘newsy’flavour. Make online hyperlinks obvious. Don’t use Comic Serif for anything other than yourjokes or children’s section. It is the favourite choice of novice publishers and that really shows!

Blocking

In addition to your font and line spacing consideration, also try to keep all article objects visuallytogether and comfortably spaced from other articles and ads. Respect your advertisers withproper positioning and spacing. Build pages from starting with bigger ads at the bottom.Consider the spread, the two pages a reader will view and how they sit together.

Scanning

Dark areas will steal the readers’ attentions immediately, as will anything slightly vertically orhorizontally skewed. Step into the eyes of your readers. The natural eye-movement process isright-hand middle, up, top left corner left page, middle then both pages broadly, settling on themost attractive element. You can run with this or guide your readers by design.

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Advertisers

These guys are your bread and butter, look after them! Higher paying ads deserver right-handlayout. EGN (Early General News) tends to be pages 1-9 and you can charge premium forpositioning here. Publications with sports also have strengths up the back, as many readers willstart the publication from the back page. Don’t let a little business-card size ad with outlandishcolours and audacity steel attention from your quarter-page and half-page clients. If you haveto, tuck those sort of ads on the left page of some section in the middle.

Don’t fool around with ad design if you don’t know what you are doing. Your readers mayforgive you for dodgy page layout in the early days as you establish the publication (your salesperson probably won’t!), but an advertiser who ends up with a bad ad plastered all over town,or a good ad with a spelling mistake will be very hard to get back on board. And businessestalk, so one stuff-up can cost you $1000’s.

Additionally, the process of the ad design is equally important. Your goal is to produce a goodad for your advertiser that works, but if that takes you 7 iterations over 2-weeks, they willprobably ultimately say ‘Thanks’, but then take that ad to run in your competitor’s publication.

Don’t give your advertisers any reason ever to consider going elsewhere – your competitors arein their face daily, it won’t take much to lose them.

Sectioning

We know this is a significant, because when we implemented this in one of our own publicationsin 2004, the big daily in the same town launched a complete makeover 2-weeks later! Choosesections that are flexible, allowing you to choose between two or three for most articles, eg. achange of season gardening article could go into Community, Homefront, Health & Lifestyle, butan article on getting fit this spring could not go into a section on Gardening.

Make your sections standout with smart banners, titles and colours. Readers often havefavourite sections and they want to get there fast.

Proofing

Even the most diligent page layout professional can make a typo or forget to link an image. Withso many variables at play and under considerable pressures, mistakes happen. That’s why youmust have a proofing and versioning process in place.

EzyMedia tracks all changes and feedback on all pages in every production cycle. Customerscan click on an area of the page and an arrow immediately links that to a comments box to theside of page, which then starts a dialogue between publisher and designer. All our designersalso proof each other’s work before going to press.

Printers

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Make sure you know your printer’s detailed settings. Registrations, saturation requirements,half-shadow and any other filters that should be applied. These technical aspects of page layoutare just as important to the final product as the printer’s machinery and stock.

Most printers will have a pre-press department, so call them. Go in and introduce yourself. Tellthem you are new to all this but ready to learn. Pre-press technicians always appreciatepublishers play their part in a quality output. Your newspaper or magazine reflects well or poorlyon all involved, so don’t be shy to reach out for help. Understand of course that they are alsobusy, often preparing publications for 24-hour printing cycles, so respect their pressures anddon’t rock up late to your appointment!

Concluding…

Page layout for newspapers and magazines is your publication’s window to the world. Youmust get this layout process right if you are to succeed in publishing. If you are already feelingbusy with setting up your website, building your email lists, bringing in content and selling ads,you really should consider now your page layout strategy. Don’t leave this bit until the end.

I recall our first print run for a publication I launched in 2004. With $21,000 of advertising soldand 3-days before press, I decided it was time to put down the tools and see how his friend, adesktop-publisher, was coming along. When I arrived at her home, she was in tears and sayingshe just couldn’t do it. Around $4500 of the ads were time critical, so I sat with her and learnedIndesign over the afternoon. By 7pm we were both working silently. By 11pm she quit.

5-days later, without ANY sleep, working day and night, I laid out that first newspaper as mypartner Leonie designed ads and friends raced all over town picking up signed ad approvals oredited press releases to fit the limited space allotments. The publication was 2-days late ontothe streets, but early enough to retain all advertising dollars.

The next edition was 3-sleepless nights over 4-days of page layout. Then 2 sleepless nights,then 1 sleepless night, which is where is stayed for the next 4 years. These were the moststressful years of my life and probably one of the biggest drivers behind starting EzyMedia. If Ihad access then to the services, especially ad-design and page layout, that EzyMedia offerspublishers around the world today, I might very well look 10-years younger today.

Whether you are digital only or want to go to print, page layout for online page flippers and printpublications will be highly relevant to your newspaper or magazine business.

Professional page layout for newspapers and magazines is best done by professionals. Nolevels of enthusiasm or ‘born talent’ can outweigh the practical speed, proficiency and outputof professional page layout designers with years of experience. An expert magazine ornewspaper designer can produce 8 high-quality page layouts in less than 6-hours, or a 24-pagepublication in just two shifts!

And the results? Eye-catching, professional and enticing to advertisers and readers.

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We have all seen the committed efforts of a community minded individual or organisation thatlaunches a local ‘newspaper’ cum newsletter to give their community a platform for sharingstories and events. The notion is merit worthy but obviously amateur. These publications don’ttend to last long in the bigger pond, because the loyalty that might have been sustaining thepublication in the local suburb quickly dilutes in the broader regions, especially against abackdrop of other highly visible professional publications competing for the same advertisingdollars.

Trial EzyMedia’s newspaper and magazine page layout services today!

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