NEWSPAPER MAKEUP LEARNING OBJECTIVE: OBJECTIVE: Recognize Recognize the the objectives objectives of ship or or station newspaper newspaper makeup makeup and the techniques used to meet them.
"Newspaper makeup" is defined as the design of a newspaper page or the manner in which pictures, headlines and news stories are arranged on a page. The objectives of newspaper makeup areas follows: . To indicate the importance of the news l To make the page easy to read l To make the page attractive FRONT-PAGE FOCAL POINT Each page of a newspaper has a focal point - a point on the page to which the reader normally looks for the most important story. Any area can be the final point, depending on the chosen design. Advertisements can also dictate the focal points of the inside pages of a newspaper. On the front page of some daily newspapers, the focal point is often in t he upper right-hand corner a now-dated practice that reflects the t he style of a bygone era. Americans, although trained to read from left to right and top to bottom, greatly altered this pattern f or many years with respect to their newspaper reading habits. Through the use of banner headlines that extended more than half the width of the page, readers were trained to seek the upper righthand corner of the front f ront page. Newspaper readers begin their reading by foll owing the banner headline across the page and continuing down the right-hand ri ght-hand side of the page. Therefore, many newspaper readers have come to expect the most important story in each issue to appear or touch in the upper right-hand corner of the front page. The right-hand focal point is not as important to makeup editors as in the past, since fewer newspapers use banner headlines on the lead story. However, many newspapers still carry the most important story in the upper right-hand corner of the front page because of established established practices. Today, a large percentage of newspaper editors use the upper left -hand corner as the focal point. These editors think that readers, trained in school to read other literature from left to right, prefer their newspapers to be designed that way too. A few editors still use other areas, such as the upper center of the front page as the focal point. Only time will tell which is best, if indeed, there is a "best." INSIDE PAGE FOCAL POINT The focal point on inside pages is the upper left-hand corner if there are no advertisements. Therefore, the focal point is influenced by a newspaper reader's natural sight tendencies and is not hampered by customs. On inside pages with advertising, the way wa y ads are placed on the page influences the position of the focal point. The focal point is always opposite the lower corner of the page that is anchored by the largest mass of advertising. MAKEUP LINES
You will use the following four basic types of "lines" in newspaper makeup: l Vertical . Diagonal l Circular l Horizontal Vertical Line The vertical line is used to get the reader to read up and down the page. The line is carried out on the page by displaying stories, headlines and pictures vertically on the page. It is characteristic of the makeup of newspapers in early America and is still used to a limited degree in making up newspapers today. Diagonal Line The diagonal line is used in newspaper makeup to get the reader to read through the page. The line is carried out on the page by displaying headlines and pictures so together they forma diagonal line from the upper left-hand corner to the lower right-hand corner of the page. Also, a page can contain a double diagonal by forming another diagonal in the opposite direction from the first. The diagonal line lends a sense of rhythm to the page. It is characteristic of many of today's newspapers. Circular Line The circular line is used in newspaper makeup in an attempt to get the reader to read around the page. The line is carried out on the page by displaying stories, headlines and pictures on the page so the reader sees each as being equally important. This creates a tendency on the reader's part to read all the stories. The circular line is used to a limited degree in modem newspapers. Horizontal Line The horizontal line is used in newspaper makeup to get the reader to read back and forth on the page. The line is carried out by displaying stories, headlines and pictures horizontally on the page. The horizontal line is a post-World War II development and it is probably the most striking change in the appearance of newspapers in this century. It is a characteristic of many present-day newspapers. NEWSPAPER DESIGN CONCEPTS LEARNING OBJECTIVE: Detail the design concepts used in ship or station newspaper makeup.
Successfully designing a newspaper page encompasses more than experimentation. It is actually a calculated art evidenced by the following five newspaper design concepts: . Balance l Contrast . Rhythm l unity l Harmony BALANCE
In the balance concept, the page designer (hereafter referred to as the editor, although it may be any member of the newspaper staff performing this function) tries to balance heads against heads, pictures against pictures, stories against stories and artwork against artwork. This balance, however, is a relative balance, and it is not measurable but is something gauged in the viewer's mind. Therefore, the editor has to sense, rather than measure, the balance for a page. This perception is one
Figure 8-18. - Individual components of newspaper makeup. developed by experience. The editor looks at the page CONTRAST In the contrast concept, the editor strives to separate display items on the page so each gets the attention it deserves. The editor uses type, headlines, pictures, white space and color to achieve contrast. For example, the editor can achieve contrast with type by using regular type with boldface type. Headlines also can be contrasted by using bold, blackheads or by displaying reman type with italic type. The editor can achieve contrast with pictures by using verticals with horizontals, small column widths with large column widths or dark and light photographs. Further, the editor can achieve contrast through color by displaying black type with color boxes, pictures and heads. RHYTHM
By using the rhythm concept, the editor tries to get the reader to move fr om one element to another element on the page. Rhythm is achieved in newspaper makeup by staggering headlines, stories and pictures on the page. UNITY The unity concept of newspaper makeup is used to tie the page together; therefore, the page is not divided into one, two or more sections. A page that lacks unity is called a paneled page. You can avoid paneled pages by crossing the column gutters (space between columns) with headlines and pictures in the middle areas of the page. HARMONY The harmony concept is used to give a newspaper a standard appearance from day to day. Harmony generally refers to typographic harmony. This means using one typeface for body type and a contrasting typeface for cutlines. Headlines should have the same typeface as the body type and maybe varied by weight and the use of italics on occasion.
ELEMENTS OF NEWSPAPER MAKEUP LEARNING OBJECTIVE: Identify the individual elements used in ship or station newspaper makeup.
Thus far, all the subject matter in this chapter has dealt with the tools and materials available for presenting the reader of a ship or station newspaper with an attractive, interesting and convenient look at the news. Whether you achieve the desired product will depend on how these tools and materials are used in assembling your newspaper.
If you are the person responsible for laying out, making up or actually pasting up your newspaper, you should adopt a basic typographic plan or style. First, read all of the copy being considered for the newspaper. Study the pictures and other artwork closely. Visualize the news story message, or ideas, and the nature of the artwork as a whole. Decide the relative importance of the elements; then put the entire page together using the individual components of newspaper makeup (fig. 8-18). Makeup creates recognition of a newspaper. A good editor varies the makeup in each issue, so the readers are not bored with the newspaper. On the other hand, each page will resemble the previous editions enough so the reader can immediately identify it. The following components help the reader identify a newspaper: l Nameplate l Flags l Masthead . Headlines l Pictures l Whites, grays and blacks . Rules NAMEPLATE The nameplate should be simple in design, attractive, and in harmony with the character of the paper. Its type should either harmonize or contrast with the headline type. The nameplate can combine type and artwork together. The artwork however, should not make the nameplate jumbled and hard to read. Figure 8-19 shows several examples of nameplates. The nameplate can be made to float on the page. Although a nameplate that runs the entire width of the page can be made to float, a floating nameplate usually occupies two or three columns and is placed anywhere in the upper third of the page. FLAGS A flag of the newspaper is a display used by a newspaper to indicate section pages or special pages, such as editorial, sports and family pages. Just like nameplates, a flag should not dominate its page and should appear above the fold. Flags can also be floated. (NOTE: Some authorities maintain that a flag is the same as a nameplate and identify a section head as a "section logo." We do not.) MASTHEAD A masthead of the newspaper is often refereed to, incorrectly, as a nameplate. A masthead is a statement that should appear in every edition to give information about the publication. The masthead of a CE or funded military newspaper includes the following elements: l The name of the officer in command or head of the activity.
l The name of the newspaper and the producing command. l The following statement: "The editorial content of this newspaper is prepared, edited and provided by the public affairs office of (command)." l The name, rank or rate (if military) and editorial position on the newspaper staff of all personnel assigned newspaper production and editing duties. This is listed under the heading "(command) Editorial Staff." l The following disclaimer: "This newspaper is an authorized publication for members of the military services (add the words "stationed overseas" "at sea" or "and their families" if applicable). Its contents do not necessarily reflect the official views of the U.S. Government, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Navy and do not imply endorsement thereof." l The following disclaimer (for CE newspapers only): "The appearance of advertising in this newspaper, including inserts of supplements, does not constitute endorsement by the Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, (name of command) or (name of publisher) of the products and services advertised" "Everything advertised in this newspaper shall be made available for purchase, use or patronage without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, marital status, physical handicap, political affiliation or any other nonmerit factor of the purchaser, user or patron. If a violation or rejection of this equal opportunity policy by an advertiser is confirmed, the publisher shall refuse to print advertising from that source until the violation is corrected" "Published by (name of publisher), a private firm in no way connected with the DoD or U.S. Navy, under exclusive contract with the U.S. Navy." For second-class mailing, postal regulations require a masthead to be within the first five pages of the newspaper. These regulations also require that the masthead contain the following information: l Name of publication l Date of issue . Frequency of publication l Issue number l Subscription price (if applicable) l Name and address of the publisher l Second-class mailing imprint The masthead of CE or funded newspapers must be printed in type not smaller than six point. Additional information on mastheads maybe found in PA Regs or Ship or Station Newspaper/Civilian Enterprise (CE) Publications, NAVPUBINST 5600.42 series. HEADLINES Headlines, or simply heads, contribute to all five concepts of newspaper design - balance, contrast, rhythm, unity and harmony. The headline for one story should be separated from that of another. Heads that appear side by side (called 'Tombstones") could be read as one head and confuse the reader. Tombstoning also prevents each head from gaining its share of attention.
When headlines and pictures are used together, they should be placed so the reader is not confused by their positions. You should not place a picture between a headline and a story, because the reader might begin reading the cutline thinking it is the first paragraph of the story. Heads of the same column width should not be placed lower on the page than a smaller one, or higher on the page than a larger one. This does not mean that the bottom of the page cannot contain a large multicolumn head. It only means that heads of the same width should decrease in point size as they descend the page. Do not run stories out from under their heads. This creates a readability problem by confusing the reader about where to find and finish reading the rest of the stor y. A story can be wrapped (to continue a story from one column to the next) under its main head, or lead, to achieve variation. A story is always turned to the right from its main part. A turn running above the headline of the story could confuse the reader and cause the individual to abandon the item. A story requiring a "jump," or continuation, to another page should be split in mi dsentence, never at a period of a paragraph. For example, "(Continued on page , col. ) will direct the reader adequately. The jumped portion should carry a brief head, or key word, taken from the main head to identify it as a continuation. The "jump head" should be keyed to the same type style and face, although it seldom will be in the same type size, as the original headline. Never jump a story on a hyphenated word, or carry over the last line of a paragraph. PICTURES Readability studies have shown that pictures are one of the most popular elements in a newspaper. For that reason alone, important pictures should be large and positioned in a manner that maximizes their display. Pictures of two-column widths or more should be placed on a page so they stand or hang from something that gives them support. A picture can stand on a headline, another picture or the bottom of the page. A picture can hang from a headline, another picture or the top of the page. A picture of two-column widths or more should not float in copy, but a one-columnwide picture or smaller can float in copy. Pictures and headlines that are not related should be separated by more than a rule, if the possibility exists that, when placed together, they are humorous or in bad taste. Avoid any clashing items. For example, do not place an accident story next to a mortuary advertisement. (Discuss the placement of advertisements with your editor or the CE newspaper publisher.) If you run two pictures, two boxes or a picture and a box side by side, except in cases where the subjects are related, they tend to cancel each other out. It is best to separate unrelated artwork with body type. Reader's eyes have a tendency to follow the line of sight of people in pictures. Therefore, if people in a picture look off the page, readers will tend to look off the page. To prevent the
reader from doing this, the main subjects in pictures should look straight ahead or into the page. This also holds true for pictures showing action. The motion should go toward the center of the page whenever possible. This reader tendency can be used to your advantage. The line of sight and motion can be used to guide the reader's eye through a page. Try to avoid running pictures on the horizontal fold of a newspaper, because the area along the fold becomes distorted once the newspaper has been folded. Do not give a picture more display space than it deserves, especially a "mug shot" (portraittype, close-up photograph of an individual). Mug shots can float in copy, but it is best if they stand on or hang from something. If a mug shot floats, it is best to float it within a sentence in a paragraph. Mug shots should be accompanied by at least a name line for identification. By omitting the name line, the reader is forced into trying to identify the individual in the picture. "Thumbnails" also are used in making up newspaper pages. The term refers to half-column mug shots. A thumbnail is best used when it looks into the story or directly out of the page. A name line, in most cases, should also be used with thumbnails. WHITES, GRAYS AND BLACKS A newspaper page is made up of varying degrees of whites, grays and blacks. Some pages may contain other colors. A good editor strives for relative balance of colors on a page and will not let any color dominate the page. You will not have any problems with white pages, black pages or any other colored pages; your concern is staying away from gray pages. There are many ways to relieve grayness, or gray-out, which is created by large areas of body type. One way is to use multicolumn pictures to break up columns of type. Another way is to use thumbnail photographs. Type also can be used effectively to relieve grayness. To breakup gray areas in a long story, you can set selected paragraphs in boldface type, if used sparingly. Another method of breaking up long gray stories is to use boldface subheads set about two points larger than your body type size. A third method of using type to break up grayness is to use boldface, allcap lead-ins. This method is particularly effective in matter set in wider measures. In twocolumn matter, the first three to five words of the paragraph containing a lead-in can be set in boldface and all caps, and in one-column matter, the first one to three words of the paragraph can be set in boldface and all caps. The paragraphs to be set in any of these boldfaced methods should be the paragraphs that introduce anew element into the story or ones that contain information of more than usual interest. Two paragraphs using the same boldfaced method should not be run side by side because they tend to cancel each other out. Note that the use of boldface type is not favored by the editors of contemporary newspapers as much as by the editors with traditional leanings. (More about traditional and contemporary designs will be presented later in this chapter.) "Modem" editors rely on the use of different design concepts to eliminate large gray areas on their pages and consequently have little use for boldface type, except possibly as subheads. Other useful devices in breaking up grayness are initial letters (mentioned earlier in this chapter), kickers and hammerheads (covered in Chapter 9) and sandwiches.
A sandwich is a device for handling "reefers" (References to a related story on another page). It is a small, sideless box made with the same rule used for regular boxes. The reefer type in the sandwich should be set in boldface and not be indented. No headline is needed and it should be brief, containing not more than two or three lines. The sandwich should be placed about 2 1/2 inches deep into the story. Presumably, this practice gives the reader enough time to become interested enough in the subject being addressed to want the related information being offered. The use of the sandwich assumes the reader will immediately turn to the related story, read it and then return to the original story and continue reading below the sandwich. Special effects can be obtained with special art, such as boxes and ornaments (art borders around individual stories, announcements and ads or the entire page). These devices are also effective gray breakers but should be used sparingly, so their use does not create a cluttered effect. In using boxes, you can indent a story on all sides and use a box of white space all around the story. You can also indent on all sides of a story and then use a ruled box. Dingbats, once in vogue, are now considered old-fashioned and are shunned by modem editors. White space provides margins to frame your page. Side margins should be the same width, but bottom margins should be about one-fourth wider than your top margins to give your page a lifted look White space is also used to give breathing room around headlines and pictures in much the same manner as margins frame the page. However, you should make an effort to avoid the appearance of trapped white space. White space should run to the outside of the page. RULES Rules are commonly used typographic devices in newspaper makeup. Properly used, they separate unrelated items and unite related ones. The two types of rules used are the column rule and the cutoff rule. Column Rule The column rule is a vertical, thin line that runs from the top to the bottom of a newspaper page. Use the column rule to separate columns of type and to separate unrelated items, such as photographs and stories, from the rest of the page. Part of a column can be deleted to indicate that the items joined are related Cutoff Rule A cutoff rule is a horizontal, thin line that runs across one or more columns of a newspaper page, depending on the width of the items to be separated or united. A cutoff rule is used to separate unrelated items, such as boxes, photographs, multicolumn headlines and advertisements, from the rest of the page. A cutoff rule helps the reader's eye turn the corner from where a story ends in one column to where it begins in the next column, except when the story wraps from the bottom of a page. Then no cutoff rule is needed ADDITIONAL MAKEUP CONSIDERATIONS Newspapers have other elements that usually appear in each issue and other makeup devices that are used to design newspaper pages. Some of these are described in the following text.
Widows Avoid having widows at the tops of columns. A widow is an incomplete line, as one that ends a paragraph. When there is a widow, carry two lines to the new column or page. Wrapping Copy When you wrap copy, wrap at least 1 inch of copy into t he next column. That is approximately six lines of type. Studies have shown that anything less than an inch of copy lacks eye appeal. When you wrap a story, split paragraphs at the bottom of the column, when possible, to indicate to the reader that the story continues in the next column. Folio Line A folio line is an identification line of the newspaper on each page. The folio line on the front page is different from those on inside pages, as described in the following sections. FRONT-PAGE FOLIO LINE. - A front-page folio line j oins the nameplate and consists of the volume number (the number of years the publication has been in print), the issue number (the number of issues published within the present year), command, location (city and state), and date of publication. It does not carry a page number and is usually separated from the flag by a border and a cutoff rule or by two cutoff rules. INSIDE PAGE FOLIO LINE. - An inside page folio l ine generally runs at the top of each page. It also can run as part of a fl ag that appears on special pages or within the masthead on the editorial page. The inside page folio line consists of the publication date (left corner of the page), name of the newspaper (centered) and the page number (right corner of the page). An inside page folio line is normally separated from the rest of the page by a cutoff rule, but as you can see in figure 8-15, this is not a requirement. PAGE PERSONALITY The quality of the layout and makeup of the inside pages of your newspaper should receive the same attention as the front page of the newspaper. Readers should not be shortchanged once they leave the front page of a newspaper. Special pages, such as editorial, famil y and sports, should have their own personalities. Editorial Page The editorial page probably is the least read of all the inside pages. The reason can be attributed particularly to makeup. Most editorial pages are very dull and very gray. A good editorial page should be as different in makeup from other inside pages as possible. Use pictures and artwork, white space, odd-column sets and other elements of makeup to give the editorial page its own special traits. Family/Leisure Page
An appealing family/leisure page features delicate type, white space and artistic designs. Use large and dramatic pictures to complement articles on off-duty leisure activities. Sports Page An attractive sports page contains plenty of action pictures. Be sure to include masculine type, white space, odd-column sets and large, bold headlines to complement the flavor of this popular newspaper page. Other Pages Inside news and feature pages should be as attractive as front pages within the limitation of available space. Use pictures, white space, multicolumn heads, artistic designs and groupings of related news and features on these pages. Advertising design Advertisement Design - a complete advertising design solution is offered. From strategizing, designing and writing the advertisement copy to supervising the photography and artwork creation. The focus is on creating original, effective and impactful advertising designs.
Based in Mumbai, India, Isha Enterprises has provided advertising design services for clients in India and abroad from a variety of sectors. Clients include garment manufacturers, medical accessories and electronic equipment manufacturers, a number of educational institutions and automobile dealers. Isha Enterprises helps customers build path-breaking brands through the strategic use of design, and has worked with a number of brands to create a diverse range of designs across different mediums. Besides creating print advertisements, Isha Enterprises has also designed outdoor displays like hoardings, gates , bannersand traffic islands. 1. Your newspaper advertising has a zero percent chance of succeeding if your prospect doesn’t notice it. Attention is everything in newspaper advertising. You need visual impact [photos], white space, a distinctive border, font, angles, or whatever it takes to stand out on the page. You newspaper advertising must be distinctive, unusual, and it should contrast with the other ads on the page. Be different. 2. Paste your ad into the newspaper to get an idea of whether or not it will stand out. 3. Where your ad is placed absolutely matters. If your quarter-page ad falls against the fold of the paper, your readership will be cut by half. Poor placement just cost you one half of your customers. Buy a different shape ad that will guarantee you an outside placement. 4. What is the paper offering? Run of press [ROP] positioning means that the publisher is free to place your ad anywhere in the normal pages of the paper. With a preferred position, your ad goes in a specific section, or near the top of a page that has reading matter on it. A near reading [NR] position is placement anywhere on a page near reading matter. This is better, because people reading the paper spend more time on that page.
You want your ad to be on a page where people spend time reading. The longer they stay on the page with your ad the better. You normally will pay a premium of 10% - 50% for good position, but it’s probably worth it. Good positioning could double or triple your response rate. 5. Use only serif typeface for copy. It boosts reading speed, and can increase comprehension by up to 300% over other fonts. 6. Editorial style advertising increases readership by over 50%. With editorial style advertising, the copy is laid out like a regular news story. The word "advertisement" always appears above the copy. If you have a story to tell, think about using editorial style advertising. 7. Your newspaper advertising should be easy to look at and easy to read. Poor use of capitalization, bolding, or italics will decrease reading comprehension by 50%. Bad sentence structure will also reduce comprehension. 8. Use #12 font for copy. Use #14 font if your customers are senior citizens. 9. Don’t use technical jargon. You will lose way too many readers. 10. Reversed copy gets attention in newspaper advertising, but it is hard to read. If you use it, keep the copy very short, and the font very big. 11. Make sure photos face into your ad, not toward a competitors ad. 12. Make sure your newspaper advertising looks different from your competitor's. Don’t advertise for them. 13. Vary sentence and paragraph length. Eight words per sentence will get the highest readership. 14. A smaller ad should have a single focus – one solution for one problem. 15. Busy layouts often work better than clean, balanced ads because they keep the reader involved. 16. Use benefit captions under your photos in all of your newspaper advertising. These will get read. 17. Word your offer carefully and clearly. Your offer is a promise about the level of service you will deliver to your customer's. Your offer will set your customers expectations, so you want to be very clear. 18. Coupons get the highest response rate for all printed marketing materials. Use one if you can in your newspaper advertising. Before you start your magazine, go to a newsstand and purchase a few magazines that catch your eye. Take them home and try to decide WHY they caught your eye. What is it?... the photos? the layout? the subject of the magazine? Use elements you like in other magazines to inspire your magazine's layout. And do your best to not let the computer dictate your layout. The software works for you not the other way around. Use a Great Masthead
The masthead is your magazine's logo. It is most often located at the top of t he cover and should be the first thing your reader sees. It must be legible and tell people about your magazine. You have looked at your magazine thousands of times but your readers have not. If the masthead is developed with illegible fonts, people won't view it as you intended.
If your magazine is on the newsstands, there are other considerations of which you need to be mindful. Unless your magazine is on the front row, readers will see only the top 2" of your magazine. Does that area in your design lock in the reader's attention? Try testing your magazine by printing out the cover and putting another magazine in front with the top 2" showing. Now take a look from across the room. This is how future purchasers will be seeing it. Remember, your cover design will be fighting the other covers for attention. A well-designed masthead visually entices the buyer to choose one magazine over others in its category. Use a Great Cover Photo
DON'T try to save a few bucks on the cover. A well -designed cover can get your magazine noticed and even more importantly, picked up! Therefore, all cover photos must be of a good, high quality photo (in the proper resolution). Choose a photo that is interesting to your potential readers or which tells a story. Showing the unexcited face of an unknown person will not do much to get the potential customer to reach for your magazine. Choose a photo that is recognizable to your target readers or shows action, unusual colors, taken from unusual angles, or combinations of all these. Remember, your magazine only gets one chance to make its first impression. Photos are powerful in making a good first impression. Careful Font Usage
The choice of fonts can have a major impact on the overall professionalism a magazine conveys. Using too many font faces is visually confusing to the reader. He/she may have trouble distinguishing the stories from the ads. Not to mention that too much "stuff" can be tiring on the eyes. Consider using only one to two font families in your articles; one for the headlines and subheads, one for the body text.
Research shows that serif fonts, especially small ones, are easier to read than san-serif fonts (serifs are the little tick marks at the end of lines in the letters). The eye tracks across the serifs of the letters making reading easier.
ALL CAPS are difficult to read. If you want to emphasize a word consider using bold versions of that font as an alternative. Stretching/compressing fonts look awkward. Consider
the extended or condensed version of that font or even another font family. Multi-column Layouts
One trick for having your stories look professionally built is to use a multi-column grid to the page. For regular sized magazines try using three columns, digest sized mags use two. Not only does it look more professional but text will flow better on the page and you will have more options for placing photos. Don't Be Afraid of "White Space"
Although it can be difficult, consider leaving some areas of the page blank. Stuffing as much as you can onto a page is visually overwhelming to the reader. Experiment with leaving some column white space in your new multi-column layout. Try running text in one of the columns only with a photo or graph covering the other two columns. Try starting your article halfway down the page with the top half being reserved for a photo. Experiment - computers make that easy. Stay Away from the Edge
Many magazines that come through our facilities have layouts with text too close to the edge of the page. Again, don't try to fill up the entire space. 1/4" margin is the minimum suggestion but better 1/2" or even more, page margin is suggested. Again, it looks more professional adding more white space and you will not worry about the possibility that text might be cut off when the magazine is cut down to size after printing.
Avoid Clip Art
Market research has shown that cartoons do not sell to adults. In this case you are selling the story to the reader. He has not read the story and is deciding whether to or not based on the graphics. If hokey, cheap clip art is used there is a good chance he will not r ead the article. Of course if your article deals with child-related subjects then clip art MAY be acceptable. Remember...It's Only a Magazine
You have invested a great deal of time, creative energy and perhaps money in your magazine. Because of this, you will be dismayed to have your work judged harshly BUT it still won't be perfect when your time deadline comes around. Keep in mind - you may be the only one that ever notices minor imperfections. You don't hyper-analyze other peoples' magazines - your readers won't hyper-analyze yours! It is only a magazine...not a work of art. Other Magazine Tips
Below are a few other tips that will make your magazine a little more successful. Don't Forget Contact Info
Now that you have a reader you of course would like them to be a long-term reader. We see many magazines come in that forget to tell readers how to subscribe. Your contents page is a good place to list the following info: your physical address your web and email address subscription price how to subscribe Book Design Some books involve book designers right from their conception. These are books in which the way the content is presented is intrinsic to the purpose of the book. Think of manuals, travel books, workbooks that accompany another text or a seminar. These are all examples of books where design will play an important role right from the beginning. General nonfiction books are less likely to involve designers at the beginning. But that doesn’t mean authors shouldn’t start paying attention to how their books are put together. I think it’s fair to say that authors who are truly concerned about communicating their message effectively to their readers will pay attention to the design of their books.
Consistency is Important Many design issues can wait until the manuscript is complete. The principle thing for authors to think about while writing their book is consistency. Books, by their nature, need to be consistent. Cues are sent to readers, often below their level of awareness, about how the book is organized and what to expect as they proceed through the book. Here are some points to think about as your manuscript comes together. With all these suggestions, keep the reader uppermost in your mind. You’re writing to be read. Every other consideration ought to be secondary to getting the reader your information in the best possible way for them to consume it.
9 Book Design Tips that Authors Need to Know 1. Book division. Decide whether you’ll divide your book into chapters. Decide if you’ll use parts to organize the chapters into coherent sections, and if there’s a good reason to do this. For instance, if your book covers a wide range of time, it might make sense to impose a structure by dividing the main sections of the book into different parts, then, below those, to divide content into individual chapters. 2. Non-text elements. Be consistent in how you number chapters, parts, tables, figures, charts, and so on. A good method for numbering graphics is to use both the chapter number and sequential item number. For instance, in chapter 1, the graphics (or tables or figures) might be numbered Figure 1-1, Figure 1-2, and so on. In chapter 2, start the numbering over again, like this: Figure 2-1, Figure 2-2 and so on. This will make it immediately obvious to everyone working on the book which graphics go where. It also keeps your references simpler and easier to track. 3. Epigraphs. (Not epitaphs which appear on tombstones!) These are the quotations authors like to put on the chapter opening page. If you put these on one or two chapters, readers will expect to find them on every chapter. And if the first six epigraphs are one liners, do you really need that half- page quote you stuck into chapter 10? No, you don’t. 4. Bold type. Don’t use bold within the text of your book. It won’t look good, it’s nonstandard and it devalues the text around it. If you need to emphasize something, use italics or re-write so it has a natural emphasis from the structure of your prose. Bold is fine in heads and subheads. 5. Formatting. Don’t kill yourself formatting. Most of the formatting authors do in their manuscripts ends up on the layout designer’s floor, discarded as useless to the book construction process. 6. Styles. Learn to use styles instead of local formatting. Are you using Microsoft Word? Have you ever looked at the style menu or style palette? Putting in 20 minutes to learn to use styles (and it won’t take longer, I promise) will save you many hours of tedium in your writing life. And you want to spend your time writi ng, not f ormatting, don’t you? 7. Tabs. Eliminate the use of tabs within the text of your document. Tabs are unnecessary unless you’re creating tables or other non-text graphics. Your designer will only have to strip them out, and any tabs inadvertently left in the fi le could be problematic later in the design process.
8. Spacing. Don’t double space between sentences. 9. Backups. Make a backup. Make another one, and email it to yourself. This is the fastest and safest off-site backup you can get. And it won’t cost you anything. The file, as an attachment to your email will sit on your email server until you decide to delete it (check your email client settings to see if messages are automatically deleted after some specific amount of time has elapsed.) A lot of these suggestions are aimed at manuscripts you are preparing to send to a book designer or layout artist. While you’re working on your book you probably will do lots of formatting because it simply makes the document easier to understand and more visually enjoyable to work on. Work on a copy of your file instead. Designate it as a backup because you will delete it when you change the master file, then create another copy to work on. You don’t want to end up with more than one version of your file, if both have unsynchronized changes. Paying a little attention to how your book is going to l ook, how it will be constructed, will pay off when you go into production. Your book will get to press more quickly, it will be more consistent, and it will be better at communicating your content.
