Yoga & Spa Summer Magazine

Creating a magazine is an incredibly daunting task – especially if you have never done it before. That was the place I found myself in quite recently when starting work on the summer issue of Yoga & Spa magazine.  Sure, designing an ad or a single article that gets placed in a magazine is one thing, but when you are the sole graphic designer responsible for the creation and delivering of a complete issue, things can get overwhelming.

The process started with a sit down with the magazine’s publisher. During the meeting, she decided the number of pages she wanted me to try to tackle and then began laying the issue out on loose bits of notebook paper. Luckily for me, this magazine has been around for a while so the publisher knew what she was doing. We discussed styles of design that she wanted to work with in the issue and that she wanted an overall clean and simple layout with bright, fun summer colors.

My next step was to get back to the office and create a pagination of the magazine in Indesign. This meant that I went through the notebook rendering of the first layout and created exact measurements of each ad and article in my layout program. What ads carried over from previous issues I placed in this pagination and also plugged in some stock photos. The point of this pagination was to help the publisher take a rough draft around and sell advertising space and article space.

Over the next few weeks I would take article and ads that the publisher sent me (both ads that needed to be designed and camera ready) and plugged them into their appropriate places. Every two weeks or so I would send an updated pagination to the publisher so she could get a feel for where we were in the process and also move things around when needed. Things may seem like a good idea when you initially draw them out on paper, but seeing a layout in its completed form is a whole different story.

After many hours of last minute tweaking, it was time to do a last, incredibly thorough look over to find any typos or image problems. It is always very important to double check page numbers and image bleeds to optimize printing success. I then proceeded to save the magazine as a pdf and upload it to the printer.

All in all, this magazine was an incredibly amazing experience. I can now hold a magazine issue in my hands and say “I did this.” Crunch time was pretty hectic. There were two straight days devoted solely to this magazine but it was totally worth it.

You can check out a pdf of the summer issue of Yoga & Spa magazine here. Let us know what you think!!

Written by Myranda Harnage