Chapter 2 : Editorial formats

Until the introduction of the tablet in 2010, national newspapers, consumer and lifestyle magazines, and glossy supplements represented the highest status of editorial design. However, digital publications are now developing fast and providing new opportunities for editorial designers, publishers and advertisers. The new digital family consists of websites, mobiles, Android tablets and the iPad. ‘Apps’ are enabling designers to add moving images and interactivity to digital newspapers and magazines. Many people now carry mobile devices which enable publications to have larger followings via their digital interfaces than they do in print format.

Our focus in this chapter is on editorial design for both print and digital formats, looking at regularly published editions of newspapers and magazines that set and dictate the trends for the rest to follow.

A concise history of digital publications

Early digital publications were mainly websites featuring PDF (portable document format) pages that could be flicked through as if turning the pages of a conventional newspaper or magazine. The files were, however, large and were limited by the fonts available. American publisher Condé Nast built their own custom software in-house and produced Wired, GQ and Vanity Fair without relying on external software systems. The arrival of HTML in the 1990s as a computer coding language enabled designers to embed moving content into the web. The web browser reads the tags and renders this code as pictures and text.

As interactive design technology improved, so apps appealed to advertisers who could then add moving images and interactive content to advertisements. With the arrival of the iPad in 2010, digital publishing became an even better portable experience. The iPad brought an element of play to the tools available. It also put editorial in the same portable device as all the other great things in life – email, photos, shopping, internet and reading. At the close of 2011, however, many iPad apps went back to a more stripped-down delivery: the full ‘bells and whistles’ approach was rejected and a reliance on good graphic design and smart editing returned to digital publishing. After the initial flurry of moving image and complicated interactive promises, a sense of normality returned to the digital publishing industry in 2012.

The pitfalls of sharing

However, access to another company’s content causes friction with those who invest in news gathering. Those who create journalistic content, such as The New York Times and the BBC, are bearing the cost of serious reportage. The WikiLeaks scandal in 2011 highlighted the moral debate about accessibility of news in the digital age and raised the question of who content ‘belongs’ to. The law around news gathering clearly needed to be redefined. In 2012, the British phone hacking scandal exposed the inability of the authorities to control the media and the Leveson Inquiry was called to investigate the culture, practices and ethics of the press. The report of the inquiry called for a new regulatory body to enforce set principles involving the legality, privacy and honesty in copyright.

Real Simple art director Janet Froelich uses this eye-catching feature opener to grab the attention of the reader. On the iPad the sharpness of the bold photo by Craig Culter is enhanced, giving great clarity. Many publications use a simple PDF of a printed page, but Real Simple uses the iPad format at its best, to enhance the content for the way the reader uses the magazine – often in the kitchen.

The Times newspaper uses simple headlines and iconic imagery to great effect. Special historic occasions like the presidential inauguration are an opportunity to play to its strengths as one of the world’s papers of record. Here we see the combination of foreign correspondent reporting, thorough attention to detail and dense graphical information to give the reader a substantial product.

Newspapers

Harold Evans, editor of The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981, wrote a series of seminal books on newspaper editing, layout and typography that are still used in journalism schools. In Book Five: Newspaper Design, he said:

‘A newspaper is a vehicle for transmitting news and ideas. The design is an integral part of that process. We begin with a blank sheet of newsprint and a mosaic of ideas we want to communicate, and it is the function of newspaper design to present that mosaic in an organized and comprehensible way. To do this, the newspaper designer uses text type, display type, photographs, line work, white space and a sequence of pages in the most fitting combinations.’

This is probably as succinct and accurate a description of newspapers as you will find anywhere. But Harold Evans didn’t have the internet and mobile media to contend with. The immediacy of these delivery media has now forced newspapers to provide a different service to their readers, and required designers to respond accordingly. As Mark Porter, former creative director at The Guardian, explains:

‘Many papers are now less concerned with simply reporting and more with providing background, perspective and interpretation. Rather than just telling readers what happened, these papers now have to help them understand the significance of events, and encourage them to think. Design has to respond to this in a number of ways. As stories get longer and more complex, rational and readable page layouts and typography become increasingly important. And visual journalism – intelligent use of photography, infographics and layout – has also become an essential tool for editors.

The best thing about working on a newspaper is the opportunity to work with such a wide range of incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable people. The worst is the lack of control over the detail. Most newspaper pages are not laid out by trained designers. This is very difficult for magazine-trained art directors to adjust to!’

Mark Porter, Design Director, Mark Porter Associates

Digital newspapers

In the early days of digital format, newspapers published the same pages online as in print by using PDFs on their websites. Since then a more interactive approach has been developed and is now enhanced by the use of GPS tracking. With more people buying mobile devices, news organizations have begun exploring GPS as an advertising tool. News services can link in to advertisers, based either on the reader’s interests or his or her location. This enables news organizations to retain important advertising revenue that was once generated by print advertising.

Today, editorial news designers need to be able to work with the developers of digital platforms and require a basic knowledge of coding. They must understand the verbal language that developers use so that they can work with them on keeping the visual identity of the publication intact once the pages are processed by content management systems. These systems distribute page designs onto the different platforms for mobile and tablet. They enable the change of scale required for each device, which makes a huge difference to the reader’s perception of the storytelling.

Common digital myths debunked

The arrival of the tablet marks the death of print

False The introduction of the iPad in 2010 has not changed everything; magazine titles and editorial brands are the same as they were before its launch. Tablets are fantastic devices that offer more interactive possibilities.

Readers don’t read long text on digital devices

False The idea that people use mobile devices for an instant hit when they are on the go is a myth. Since the improvement of on-screen legibility, there is evidence that readers read long-form text on digital devices. There are new ways to view information quickly and to store text for reading later, such with in apps like Instapaper. Reading habits have changed, however, and in 2012 statistics show that the average length of an online session has lengthened from a quick update to between 17 and 31 minutes.

Readers prefer to read editorial on desktop screens

False By the time this book is published, the amount of data being downloaded through desktop browsers on PCs will have been overtaken by the amount downloaded by mobile devices. It appears that the best computer is the one that you take with you. Mobile devices are used even when people are not on the move, with 84 per cent usage being from the home in 2012. This is changing our behaviour, and reading magazines and newspapers is increasingly becoming something we can do while watching television or consuming some other kind of media. Editors are realizing that they no longer have the undivided attention of their audience.

Small-run print publications will survive

True Independent publishers fiercely champion print and there will always be print publications as long as we can afford the paper to print them on. The design community continues to play with print formats and readers seem to like this. Cheaper digital printing makes it easier than ever to print a short run publication. A good example is the Newspaper Club, one of the websites where you can go to upload your editorial material and have it printed or published online.

Large print publications will not survive

False The giant media companies are less sentimental than independent publishers about print because the overheads for the traditional model of print and distribution are so expensive. Familiar titles have ceased to print and have moved to a paywall website, using responsive design across mobile and desktop. The publication has survived and in 2012 won the Society of Newspaper Designers (SND) best-designed news website. News weeklies, such as Newsweek, also closed their print operation in 2012. Such large publications, however, may be resurrected in another form in the future.

Digital terminology

Frictionless experience

A website or app’s user experience (referred to as UX) that is smooth and describes the ideal journey between different sections of a site without frustrating layers of navigation, e.g. having to go to the home page or log in again.

Geo-targeting

A marketing term for enabling content to be directed straight to a reader depending on their physical location. Publishers can use this to tailor both editorial and advertising content, e.g. restaurant listings. Mobile devices need to be GPS-enabled.

Global Positioning System (GPS)

A satellite-based navigation system that provides location and time information to devices such as those in cars, smartphones and tablets.

Liquid layout

Design software can adjust rectangular page layouts slightly between different device screen sizes. Liquid layouts are cost effective, but typographers and photographers often dislike their work being stretched.

Paywall

A system where internet users pay to access content. Some newspapers use paywalls on their websites to generate revenue following the general decline in print subscriptions and advertising revenue.

Phablet

A tablet with the added functionality of a phone.

Magazines

Mainstream consumer magazines and news-stand titles in print

In a bookshop in New York or London, a news-stand in Barcelona or a magazine outlet in China, you will find hundreds of consumer magazines all screaming for the customer’s attention through a combination of their choice of cover image, cover mounts, cover lines, brand recognition and appeals to reader loyalty. For a medium whose imminent death was widely predicted with the growth of the internet, the magazine market remains both international and vibrant in its appeal. Now, however, the printed magazine is only one member of a family of outputs. In fashion and lifestyle, the glossy printed pages remain a tactile pleasure, but this is no longer true of news and special-interest magazines, where the printed publication might be the secondary product.

The majority of consumer titles – including women’s, men’s, business, leisure, news, style and special interest – can be broken down further into different areas, interests and genres, each with its own target audience and often appearing in different country editions.

Independent publications (selfpublished magazines and zines)

The worldwide appetite for not only consuming magazines but also creating them seems to be insatiable, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the rise of independently published zines (a small circulation ‘fanzine’ with minority interest) and special-interest publications, which cater to niche audiences worldwide. These publications all hope to offer readers something that the mainstream titles, with their pursuit of huge circulation numbers, don’t. They are not afraid to indulge in long-form writing online and are seen as a powerful force in emerging graphic trends, crossing over into other areas such as art, architecture, photography, fashion and music.

Adbusters is the ultimate example of an independent magazine, founded in Canada in 1989 as an anti-consumerist, proenvironmental organization. It continues to challenge the establishment with its international campaigns such as Buy Nothing Day and Digital Detox Week.

Using elements from parent titles for supplements may seem the only way to ensure a brand is consistent, but international design consultant Mario Garcia believes that ’beyond placing the logo somewhere, supplements should have a life and identity of their own; readers are smart and will know the parent publication. Supplement design should be adventurous, and the typography more relaxed and not that of the newspaper. Photos should be bigger, more colour, better quality paper.’ The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine (left) takes this on board, with great use of full-page illustrations and wide columns to differentiate its tone and style.

The Economist exists in print format and has a successful free app. Subscribers get straightforward news, designed with clarity. There is no overreliance on interactive content, instead links to relevant articles and websites prevail, staying true to the mother brand.

The gothic ‘T’ logo signals the style magazine section of The New York Times, but it is the striking headshot that invites the reader in to this fall fashion issue. Photographers capture the moment with striking lighting and styling.

The pure graphic impact of The New York Times Magazine is clear. Janet Froelich, the art director, commissioned strong, conceptual photographs to fit within an editorial brief in close collaboration with photographers. Such great photographic details can be enhanced by typography: here the extreme exaggerated drop cap draws the eye to the curve of the jacket.

Supplements

When The Sunday Times launched a full-colour glossy magazine with its newspaper in 1962, a whole new form of publishing was born. Supplements had been around in the US since the end of the nineteenth century, but the sheer pizzazz, gloss and production values of this new form of magazine made them an instant success. They quickly came to have a cachet and regard in design circles that matched those for the highest-quality magazines, and in their 50-year history they have attracted some of the world’s best designers, delivering some of the world’s best editorial design. The need to brand and express the title as part of a much bigger family – the newspaper it comes with, which has a particular tone, stance and readership – yet give it a distinct identity of its own, is a particularly exciting challenge for designers, who can experiment with elements such as fonts, layouts and formats with greater freedom than the designer of news-stand titles. Add to this good budgets (because newspaper proprietors know that readers will buy their paper if they particularly like the magazine or supplement), and designing newspaper supplements becomes one of the best editorial-design jobs there is.

Inside front cover and contents page from M-real for paper specifiers. Every issue of the magazine changes completely, with the exception of the page size, the grid system and a diagonal corner pattern at the start of each feature, while the majority of the design elements provide newness.

Customer magazines and business-to-business

Customer magazines have developed the art of branding into an integrated part of the business world, merging visual branding with product placement and marketing. The magazines began by being exclusively available to users of a particular consumer product or service, but are now inventive and cross-platform, creating communities of people who like the same brand of product or service and who like to talk about it on social media. Unlike consumer magazines, they are financed by businesses and seen as an essential way of promoting the ‘good news’ about their brands. Brand marketers understand that for a customer magazine to work well, the content has to be informative and entertaining, and the brand promotion element should remain subtle and understated. These dual needs mean that much more is expected of a designer in customer publishing, maintains Jeremy Leslie, creative consultant at magCulture:

‘There is little difference in terms of design skills, but much in terms of strategy, thinking and broader creativity. Consumer magazines need to stand out on the shelf, but cannot risk alienating their existing audience as they seek to attract new readers. Customer magazines are interested in standing out in every and any way they can. They have to demand the attention of the reader in an appropriate way for the brand or service they are promoting. So there is far more emphasis on ideas and conceptual thinking – what can a magazine be?’

The marketplace: what’s out there?

•Each month, over 30 million copies of magazines are bought through subscription or news-stands in the US.

•In 2004 American magazines numbered 18,821 titles.

•The average American supermarket carries 700 titles, and may have 300 to 400 of those titles on the shelf at any given time.

•There are over 120 Asian–American magazine titles published in the US.

•In 2002 Germany saw 224 news-stand launches and more than 200 customer magazine launches.

•The UK has around 3,000 magazines, with about 200 of these accounting for more than 90 per cent of the total sales.

•Each year in the US around 1,000 titles are proposed, of which around a third make it to a launch issue.

US STATISTICS from the Magazine Publishers of America and Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), based on 2002 sales/circulation. UK STATISTICS from Nielsen BookData.

Digital magazine publishing

In magazine publishing, the type of market dictates the content and mode of delivery. In fashion publishing, print editions still host glossy advertisements and uphold high production values, but the sister websites offer enhanced moving-image content and exclusive reader offers. In lifestyle publishing, such as Real Simple in the US, the magazine content feeds into the website, and in turn the website introduces readers to the print version and draws in subscribers.

Cover and pages from Carlos, a publication for first-class passengers of Virgin Atlantic. The visual identity is very strong, but its strength is also its weakness; it is defined as much by what it does not do (no photography, no full colour) as what it does.

Social magazines

The most innovative companies started to gather together content that the user defined in their history or indicated that they ‘liked’. These magazines were named ‘social magazines’ in the US and were pioneered by apps such as Flipboard and Editions from AOL, and build-on social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook. The Editions app brings in content from feeds supplied by other AOL news providers and combines this with local content, enabled by the use of GPS. These kinds of magazines are a hybrid blend of a tightly edited branded product and an aggregated content feed and encourage the user to ‘share’, in a similar way that friends used to tear out printed pages to show each other.

The success of Flipboard combines the power of social networking sites with content drawn in from other sites according to the reader’s data profile. The editorial content is automatically generated. It is designed to be a one-stop shop of the user’s interests.

The slick and clean look of Real Simple underlines the aspirational values of the brand. Using a selected colour palette, it looks beautiful in print but also works well on the tablet. The interactive videos present the how-to approach and are an example of enhanced content.

The simplicity of complex editorial content on an iPad is a joy for both the reader and the designer. Here, you just tap a finger on the little pies and the recipe pops into the central area. Lots of information is held as latent content within this simple page.