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These are slides from the lecture I gave to my publication design students on the first day of class. The first half of the lecture was focused on craft. I basically looked at Case da Abitare, a beautifully redesigned Italian home magazine, and then showed my students how to take it apart. (There is a great interview with the magazine’s creative director Tyler Brûlé, art director Kuchar Swara, and photo director Stephen Ledger-Lomas logged here on our class blog.) I started with a heavily-gridded page, the Index, and reveal the magazine’s basic 12-column structure. I went on to show how lines and rules are applied to the gutters and outer margins of that 12-column grid. Then I showed how the type is sitting on a p3.5 baseline grid which governs the placement of all horizontal elements on the page. Basically, the height of any element on Case da Abitare’s pages is a multiple of p3.5. Then I showed students how to guess at type sizes based on baseline reoccurrance, and finally I showed how all of these templated elements play out across a variety of grid schemes.
The second part of the presentation is a set of “Notes on Magazines.” First, I asked students to consider magazines as a publication form by contrasting them to other types of publications. (For the sake of simplicity, I definited a “publication” as any object with multiple pages made available to the public.) This included newspapers, journals, brochures, books, and blogs. Then we looked at various “toggles” within the magazine form itself. These included timing (or frequency), scope, length, number of authors, quantity of advertising, makeup of audience, and different strategies for distribution. Finally, I sketched a “garden variety” three-act magazine. This is what most lay readers learn as the magazine form proper: front of book, feature well, and back of book, with all the content-driven and stylistic assumptions that come with those sections. —RG
For this introductory project, we will learn how grids work in publications, including margins (2D), columns (1Dv), hanglines (1Dh), and baselines (1Dh). We will also learn the names and functions of a variety of parts of a publication and we will put this knowledge to use in a presentation to the class.
WEEK 1: Pick two magazines with identifiable grids. Pick three pages from each and photocopy them. Trim your photocopies to match the magazine page so that they’re identical. Using tracing paper, sketch the margins, columns, hanglines, and baselines you think are being used. Make sure your grid is consistent for all three pages; if it’s not, make a second tracing. Select one of your sample pages and attempt to copy it using the grid you’ve traced. If you do not have matching typefaces, use the closest approximations. Make several printouts as you fine-tune your layout to document your process. Instead of dummy copy, name areas of the page after their setting, like “Headline Helvetica 16/18” (where 16 is point size and 18 is leading).
Bring your magazines, your photocopied pages, your tracing paper grids, and your process printouts to class next week for review. I will conduct short “desk crits” with each of you indiviually so you will have some time to work in class. Revise and collect your designs in an envelope with your name on it for class next week.
WEEK 2: Select a magazine you are passionate about and present at least five formal aspects of that magazine using terms we defined in class. Scan and crop slides as necessary to show what you’re describing. If possible, bring the magazine to share with the class as well. Presentations should be less than 10 minutes. After you’ve presented your work in class, post your slides and a short write-up of your presentation to the blog to get credit for your work.
This assignment is from the class Publication Design: Dispatches from the Future.
