Design: OnePage Magazine

The 'One Page Magazine' features magazines/prints that gives a single page snapshot of a magazine's content in a very interesting way.

The Onepage' TIME magazine (left) captures the main headlines in roughly the same scale and importance as in the full issue. For the UK edition of Vogue magazine (right) the artist has used logos of various advertisers from the issue.

See more onepagemagazine prints here.

Article: Are more ads going to magazines?

At a time when magazines the worldover are seeing a decline in ad pages, India is experiencing an unprecedented magazine boom. Every month sees at least one new launch and there seems to be no dearth of ad pages in any one of them.
In this article from ‘The Brand Reporter’ industry professionals explain the growth in Magazine advertising in 2007.

Extracts from the article:
Maheshwer Peri, President & Publisher, Outlook:
In this age of fragmentation and enormous wastages, magazines are the only media which would deliver filtered, specific audiences in the most cost-effective way. I see magazines only growing from here on as more specialised products make their entry felt.

Jasmin Sohrabji, Managing Director, OMD India
Increasingly their (newspapers) inclusion in the media mix will reflect their absolute cost of entry in a media plan vis-à-vis their effectiveness. Magazines show a higher ad growth, albeit on a lower base.

Aman Nayar, Brand Manager, Navbharat Times
A large number of launches have happened in the magazine category. That, and not any change in advertiser preferences, has resulted in this temporary spike.

Sidharth Banerji, Managing Director, Kyndal India
Magazines are preferred to newspapers because of many reasons. The primary reason is the pictorial outlook of the magazines compared to newspapers. Reproduction quality of magazines is far superior to that of newspaper.

Read the entire article here.

Redesign: New Look for BusinessWorld

India's 'most read, most sold' business magazine gets a new sans serif masthead, additional sections and a semi-new inside design this month.

The January 14 issue of Businessworld (The Home Stretch cover) seems to be the result a redesign process that started about a year ago. The redesign is done inhouse and was overseen by Francesca Messina, former art director, New York Times and Senior Art Director, BusinessWeek. While the magazine now offers much more variety of content to read, the 'redesign issue' does not look very striking, in fact many spreads fail to deliver on the promise of 'cleaner, contemporary, more useful design'.

Some of the things that could have done with more attention:
1) Cover: Very poor readability. Black shadow used to make the cover lines stand out ends up making them look ugly.
2) Section names: Very random and very uninspiring. Some are two words (In Depth, In Vogue) and some are combos (OnPoint) but the strangest in this selection is the pretentious 'fianchetto' where 'i' is in the shape of chess pawn!
3) Slab serifs: The magazine introduces three new fonts- Miller, Dispatch and TraceGothic. Upon Googling I found that Dispatch was designed for heavy commercial lifting by Cyrus Highsmith. Little wonder than that layouts like the one shown below seem to be from the Industrial Age!

4) Gangly 'g's: The lowercase 'g' in the section header 'In Vogue' looks very ugly as the loop goes out of the lime-coloured box. Same is repeated in a few other places in where the loop of 'g' spills over to a different box.

And finally a bright side: The subsequent issue (already on stands) does not look so hastily put together at the first glance :)

Article: The Quest for the Perfect Cover

Jan White’s* article ‘The Quest for the Perfect Cover’ in Publishing Executive nicely sums up the various roles of a magazine cover and how editors/publishers can judge the effectiveness of the cover they are planning to release. (Extract follows)

No matter what you put on the cover, keep the six functions of covers in mind:
1. Familiar recognition from issue to issue (that's the brand)
2. Emotionally irresistible (that's the image's appeal)
3. Arousing curiosity (that's to pull the casual glancer in)
4. Intellectually stimulating, interesting (that's to promise benefits)
5. Efficient, fast, easy to scan (that's showing off the service)
6. Worth the investment of money and time (that's the "What's in it for me?")
Four ways to judge your cover:
1. Covers are the prime sales tool that must be judged realistically both for content as well as form. Never trim a printout, mount it beautifully, and display it with its alternates on the finely polished surface of the conference-room table.
2. Instead, ask the designer to print out all the alternates as hard copy, trim them accurately to magazine size and glue them onto old issues, so you can see them as close to the real thing as possible. Now, toss them on a tabletop, so they flop around and overlap like real magazines do.
3. If you can spare the time, go to the local drugstore or bookstore, and sneak your upcoming issue in among the other magazines on the racks. Does it hold its own or does it disappear?
4.If selling on newsstands is not your problem, but competition among executives is, gather copies of what your targets might be reading, including your competition, of course. Mock up an executive's in-box or tabletop arrangement in some way, and place yours among them. That is the realistic way to judge your cover. Keep that still-life stack for next month's headaches.

*Jan White is the author of the book, "Editing by Design" and lectures worldwide on the relationship of graphic design to editing.

LaunchPAD: TRAFFIC LIFE

Young, opininated and unconventional (YOU) is the tone of TRAFFIC Life, the latest entry on the Indian magazine scene.

Aimed at the Urban Indian, TRAFFIC Life is the first venture of Twenty Onwards Media, a media startup based out of New Delhi. TRAFFIC Life promises to move beyond the traditional definition of a lifestyle magazine to provide content that pertains to things that actually interest and affect urban indians, "an eclectic bunch of people that are moving faster than any generation before them" according to the editorial.

Why TRAFFIC? Because it is a mixture of many different experiences that make up urban Indian life, just as in traffic one unknowingly passes "so many people, issues and stories". The inaugural December issue called "The Filmy Issue' is followed by this month's "The Hatke Issue".