Charms for the Easy Life: Thoughts on Design

People are often intimidated by design because they think it is this big complicated thing they can’t do. I am not a designer, but I can cobble together something that will not make your eyes hurt. These are only my opinions and they aren’t grounded in design theory because, like I said, I’m not a designer. I hope they are helpful.

The Aesthetics of an Online Presence

If you’re going to have an online presence, have a pretty online presence like this or this or a clean and simple online presence like Abjective, for example. Get a cheap web host. We use 1 and 1. I recommend Dreamhost.   If you absolutely insist, there are free alternatives, but you’re only helping yourself when you spring the $100 or so a year for a web provider.

If you don’t know how to do web design, don’t do something sad. Install Word Press (which is free and works nicely as a content management system) and find a sexy theme (also free). It will only reinforce your ethos to have a nice looking online presence. Dreamhost has a 1-click installation system so   you don’t need to work that hard to install Word Press. I know many writers, myself included, who will not submit to a magazine with an ugly website. Maybe we’re shallow, but it is something to consider. And sadly, there are many magazines out there with ugly websites. I don’t want to name names, but I could.

If you don’t know how to install Word Press, there’s a lot of documentation available, but you can also just e-mail me and I will help you get sorted out. It means that much to me, for things to be pretty.   I also love Word Press because once it is installed, you don’t need any programming mojo. It uses a clean, intuitive interface and can support lots of multimedia. Now, there are other options. DOGZPLOT uses Blogger as the backbone of their sites and it works for them, so there is a fantastic example of using something free and externally supported. If you’re on a MAC (or as I like to call it, the one true computing platform), you can use iWeb and create something simple and attractive without knowing HTML. Matt created the first online iteration of PANK using iWeb and it worked very very well.

You also want to think about functionality and usability. For example, The Hotel St. George Press website is absolutely gorgeous, but navigating it is pretty hard and the content is obscured by cleverness. It’s an interesting approach but not necessarily user friendly. Or I’m not that bright, which is also a possibility.

FYI: PANK is currently designed using HTML & Dreamweaver without content management. It is a problem. We are transitioning to a Drupal based system. Stay tuned for that in the next couple months.

Designing a Print Issue

Before you design an issue, it is really important to have a plan. If you just start attacking the project, it is likely that you won’t be thrilled with the results. Do yourself a favor and design using InDesign. It is a powerful desktop publishing program that will make your life infinitely easier both in terms of performing layout and working with your printer. It is easier to use than you might think.

Make list of everything you need to include in your magazine. Sketch out how a page might look for a prose piece and a poem and artwork. How are you going to work with images? Write down the rules you want to establish for yourself so you can maintain consistency. If you’re using InDesign, you can use Master Pages and Paragraph Styles to maintain consistency.

You want to think about how you’re going to design the cover, the masthead, fine print, the table of contents, individual pages, and contributor bios. Readers appreciate repetition so you want to have some kind of common theme to bind these elements together whether it is a design element, typography, or color. If you have no design experience but need a quick primer, get thee a copy of Robin Williams’ The Non-Designers Deisgn Book.

Design Specs for PANK 3

8 x 8 inch with a 1/2 12 C1S   (one color (outside cover) over two color (inside cover), coated on one side) cover and 240 2-color (black + PMS red) interior pages printed on 70 lb matte.

Fonts: Helvetica Neue (a multi-facted and robust font) for headings, Minion Pro for the content and Dakota-Handwriting for the TOC and Author Bios.

Our printer was McNaughton Gunn in Ann Arbor, MI. PANK 1 & 2 were printed at the University of Minnesota Press, a fine but more costly printer.

The Cover

A good cover will draw readers in. A bad cover will not. I love reading Chip Kidd’s Book One for design inspiration. You need to think about two things–aesthetics and incorporating logistical information. It is eay to forget that we need to include logistical information with whatever cover image we use–information like ISSN or ISBN numbers, the title, the volume and issue numbers, bar codes, etc. I’ve forgotten these things and it is AWKWARD having that conversation with the people to whom you are accountable. Learn from my mistake. Remember the title if you want the title to appear on the cover. We actually didn’t put the title on the cover of PANK 3 and it mostly worked out. The title will be on the PANK 4 cover.

PANK 3 Cover

PANK 4 Cover

Often times, magazine covers try too hard with the cover. At AWP, I noticed that many covers were just too loud, too busy, too look at me, I know how to use Photoshop.   A piece of art you think is great may not be as great as you think. Get some feedback from people who aren’t attached to the project before you commit to cover art. You also want to be sure that the cover design you choose reflects the aesthetic of the writing beneath the cover. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to create a disconnect between design and content.

It’s also easy to forget that where there’s a front cover, there is a back cover. You may or may not want to do something with the back cover.

Administrative Information or Fine Print

Just because you have some boring information to include doesn’t mean that the presentation of that information has to look boring. Below is how we designed the blah blah blah small print for PANK 3:

It’s a full square of text, justified, without hyphenation. Easy peasy. There are also other approaches. I offer this merely as an example.

Table of Contents

Your TOC needs to be usable so that readers can access the information they need quickly. If you over design the TOC, you obscure a lot of important information. The TOC isn’t about how well you can design, but rather, how well you can design information. Below is the TOC for PANK 3. I was going for the look of an old-fashioned ledger with handwritten entries. It may be a bit overdesigned.

Page Design

When you’re designing content pages you need to consider content presentation and navigation. How are readers going to orient themselves within the page and within the larger context of the entire publication? Below is a sample page from PANK 3. I   read a graphic novel right before I started designing this issue and I love the way graphic novels artists design information. I also felt like the writing we publish is very visual, so it was a play on that with the header, and then the footer at the end of a given piece with the author bio meant to mimic dialogue boxes in a graphic novel. I was also very interested in including the author bio within the same creative work. I really really hate having to flip to the back of a magazine issue to find out who did what. I like instant gratification. This approach was not without it’s frustrations. When a story or poem ran to the bottom of the page and we had to put the author bio alone on the next page, that was a bit awkward. I’m trying to conjure up a solution to this for PANK 4.

We’re likely going to stay with a similar design for PANK 4, though I know for sure I need to do something with the grey text at the top of the page. It is a little sad up there, without any context or relationship to the other blocks of information on the page. I also worry about the page numbers.

• Avoid over designing. It is so tempting to go crazy but you want the writing to be the star, not your design.   Take Ninth Letter for example. They are a fine fine magazine. I would pee myself to be in their magazine. Their design is generally outstanding, but they have the distinct advantage of being affiliated with a design program. They are not the bar. They are miles above the bar.   And in many ways, that is their biggest flaw. A lot of their pages are over designed and it makes the stories very hard to read and that defeats the purpose of a literary magazine.
• Avoid under designing. Nothing but words and page numbers is a little boring. Throw something in there that lets your reader know that you have considered form and function.
• Most of the time it is cost prohibitive to print using two colors, but you can create visual contrast in a one color publication by using shades of gray.
• There are more fonts out there than Arial and Times New Roman. See what’s out there before you commit to the old standards. The traditional rules of design state that you should use sans serif fonts like Arial, Geneva, Helvetica, etc for headings and serif fonts like TNR, Georgia, Garamond etc for the content itself.   This improves readability. Rules are certainly made to be broken but if you’re a new designer, you may want to start in the shallow end of the design pool. Don’t use too many fonts in an issue. That’s another instance of over design.
• Avoid using a font size smaller than 10 pt. You want the reading experience to be pleasant.
• Know what information you’re going to include on each page and what you’re going to do with it. Are you going to have the author name and the story title on facing pages? Why or why not? Are you going to use your magazine name on each page? Why or why not?   If you’re going to include that kind of information, are you going to put it at the top or the bottom of the page? Why?
• You can really make your publication stand out by getting creative with the simple design elements on each page like headers/footers/page numbers. Some examples are below. Feel free to steal them and remix them and whatnot.
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Finally, if you see a magazine whose design you like, and you have questions about how they did it, e-mail them and ask. We were curious as to the cover stock the New Ohio Review used so we e-mailed them and they were very gracious and wrote back. If you need a designer but have no money, consider bartering services. Everybody has something someone else needs.