Striking covers and punchy content pages in your magazine lures the audience, marketing your product with penetration power. Irrespective of your genre, the design of your magazine needs to be impactful. Visual pleasure plays a key role in creating an impact in the minds of your audience. Creativity and experimentation should drive the designing process to deliver a dynamic character to the magazine. Here, you will come across some great tips to craft an effective magazine design.
You can’t be shy with the covers
A magazine design should stir up the emotions, feelings and sensations of your target audience. People should pick up the magazine and have a look at the inside pages. The entire effort in designing the inside pages goes in vain if the readers do not feel the necessity to pick the magazine. Therefore, you should focus on the covers and try out bold elements. You may incorporate bright colour spectrums, images or other elements on the covers to draw the desired attention. Still, you need not be too rash with the cover. It should be bold and impactful, yet decent. Use powerful headers, subheads and simple graphics to create an impression in a subtle way. Experts are well acquainted with how to create a magazine cover in Adobe InDesign. However, there are several other software programs upon which you can rely.
Use a single colour-pop on the cover
This is one of the most operative magazine cover design tips.You can use the colours sparingly, yet effectively on the cover. Bright and multi-coloured covers may not be able to draw the attention of the audience, as they are too common. A single colour pop can make the cover more inviting and appealing. Use a bold colour for the purpose. It will attract more eyes, due to the difference in visual impact it creates among the readers. Integrate this bright colour pop with monochrome photos in black and white.
Create a palatable content page
The content page is the second-most important area you should focus on during the designing process. People flip through the cover page and go through the contents in the edition. You need to use the right visual materials and texts to guide them about the materials in the publication. Spread out the contents across two or more pages. Use adjacent pages for presenting the content, as it creates a strong visual impact. You may also create subcategories and provide images along with the articles. Use a larger and stylish font for writing the page numbers.
Use illustrated graphics
Illustrated graphics done innovatively by a typical creative magazine design company work out well with magazines. It creates a strong visual impact, explaining the theme of the magazine. You may use vectors to express abstract concepts. Magazines apart from general niches like fashion or lifestyle look attractive with illustrated graphics on the cover. You may also use hand-drawn illustrations for the purpose. The difference between using illustrations and photos is that the former delivers a branded look to your magazine, while photos give a generic outlook to the publication.
Use infographics
Infographics infuse a digital look to the pages in your magazine. They also enable you to present the information in an organized manner. It adds a dynamic character to your magazine. It is necessary to include infographics in articles loaded with text to provide a relief to the readers from the impact of serious materials. Charts and diagrams also simplify complex materials and make them easily understandable.
Follow the minimalist trend
The trend of minimalism in magazine covers has caught up fast with the readers. They do not like complex graphic designs on the cover page. Rather, sleek and simple designs on the covers attract the readers. This is applicable particularly for fashion magazines. The photos can be displayed seamlessly on a simple background, maximizing the impact on the eyes. Make sure that the typography goes well with these designs.
Focus on the type style
Typography is an important design element, creating a mood for the reader to go through the magazine. When you use Serifs, it creates a more aspirational impact on the readers. Sans Serifs deliver a cool look to the magazine. The typography depends on the nature of the magazine. You should have a clear understanding of the psychological impact of typesetting on the readers, based on the context.
Incorporate beautiful photos
Photography plays a dominant role in most magazines. They can convey messages visually, which makes them more powerful than text. You need to use appropriate photos in the magazines to maximize the visual impact. Sports magazines, fashion magazines, nature and other magazines largely depend on photos to create an impact on the readers. You may also include images in the inside pages of the magazines. Large photos, occupying the full pages create a positive impact in the psychology of the readers. Photos complement the text to produce the desired impact on the readers.
Stick to your style theme
The style design of your magazine carries its brand image. In order to create your own identity with magazine cover designing, you need to create a distinct style-theme and keep it constant across successive publications. You may change the illustrations and other design elements in different editions, but use the same font. It becomes familiar to the eyes of the readers and they are able to identify your publication through the theme. On the cover page, you need to introduce distinct visual elements. These are also to be incorporated in the inside pages, creating a consistency all over the publication.
Think in terms of spreads
You should remember the basic mechanism of printing in the magazine. The magazines are bound in sets of two-pages. Therefore, the reader will get the magazine in the form of whole spreads, not as individual pages. Therefore, while designing the pages, you need to think in terms of spreads and not pages. You should have a good knowledge about the designing software. It will help you to eliminate common flaws during the designing process.
These guidelines will make you a better magazine designer, enabling you to present the publication in a pleasant way. A good designer offering stylish magazine design services needs to be a good marketer who can craft the magazines in such a way that they can reach out to more readers and grab maximum favors.