Develop Your Publication’s Visual Identity

Part 2: Making Your Vision Come to Life

In Part 1, we gave you a graphic design crash course and talked about where to find inspiration for your publication. Now that you have an idea of what you like, your Innovative designer can put your ideas on the page.

Establishing the Big Picture Goals

If you could describe the feeling you want readers to get from your magazine, what words would you use? Modern, bold, elegant, minimalist? This is a great starting point, and having reference images will help you and your designer understand each other’s interpretation of those different styles. One person’s idea of elegance may be more or less formal than someone else’s.

If you have an existing publication that you’re updating, you can go through it, page by page, and highlight what you want to keep and what you’d like to change.

This is a good time to express to your designer how big of an overhaul you’re willing to do. Are you ready to experiment with a brand-new look, or do you want to make subtle changes? Are there topics you’ll be featuring heavily over the next year that should guide the direction of the design? Will there be any new departments — recurring content like president’s messages and event calendars — and how do you want them to stand out from features?

If you are starting from scratch with a brand-new publication, focus on describing the type of content you want to feature, and your designer can help you figure out how to structure it.

Narrowing Down Your Preferences

Now let’s get into specific likes and dislikes. Do you prefer abstract visuals that depict objects and textures, or realistic photography that shows people in relatable scenarios? Are you for or against illustrated elements being prominently featured? If so, which illustration styles do you enjoy? Retro, flat, cartoonish, minimalist or 3D are just a few options, and your designer can show you examples.

When it comes to submitted photos, like in event recaps, would you prefer to feature only a few key images, or do you want to run every single image even if they’re all small? For features, how big can we go with stock photography? You might want photos to take up no more than half the page, or you might want photos to span an entire page or even two pages.

For typography, do you prefer thinner or thicker fonts? Do you want one consistent headline style throughout, or should we mix things up based on the specific article?

Add examples of all of these preferences to your mood board. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. You can paste images into a Word doc, and that’s still effective! You can make a slide deck, a Canva presentation or a scan of a physical collage of images taken from other magazines. Any medium can be used to get your design goals across.

Creating a Design Brief

A written guide for what you’re looking for from your project can be a helpful touchstone for both you and your Innovative designer. For the purposes of your publication, here’s an example of what a client might share with us for an overall publication re-design.

Objective

Re-design the quarterly publication for a museum curators association to be more modern, with more white space, sleek visuals and interactive elements that push readers to our association’s continuing education resources online.

Brand guidelines

These are the logos, color palettes and style guides that already exist for our association. The style guides outline everything from correct and incorrect uses of our logo to best practices for photo selection. Throughout the publication, please avoid navy blue because it’s too close to the color of a related association. Use these committee logos for specific departments.

Audience

Our audience is museum and nonprofit professionals in the Midwest. The median age in our industry is 45.

Aesthetic references

Here is a list of magazines, articles and book covers that we’re inspired by. We want to bring the visual language of a museum collection to our magazine. We want to bring the feeling of contemplation and wonder that one gets while looking at a painting in a museum to the sometimes-dry topics of collection development.

And here’s an example of what a client might share to guide the design of a specific issue.

Objective

Design a special edition of the magazine highlighting the art of the 1970s as curated by our members in their current and past collections. The cover story will be about a specific museum’s 1970s textile collection, which they are featuring for the rest of the year.

We want to incorporate fabric textures throughout the magazine and would like to see all of the articles visually linked in a way that evokes textiles. For this, we’d like to see only photorealistic elements and pencil-drawn illustration elements. Please provide three cover options and a mockup of the main feature.

Here is a rough sketch of what we think this interview piece should look like with the provided photos. We are open to feedback on the best way to approximate this idea.

Giving Feedback

Once you have a design to review, whether it’s a sample or the first proof of a completed issue, you might have changes you’d like to see. It’s helpful to critique specific elements of the design versus an overall feeling. For example, you might say:

The tapestry watermark at the upper corner of each page is a fun idea, but we don’t think that specific textile pattern reads well. It’s too busy and we don’t want the details to get lost. Can we see a different option with a larger pattern?

We think this page is too text heavy. Can we re-distribute some of the images from the rest of the article onto this page? This specific image could work well.

The more specific you can be with your feedback, the greater likelihood your designer can deliver a knockout second version. Our goal is always to give you the best possible execution of what’s in your mind, and we’re happy to hop on a call to brainstorm together.

Current Trends

To wrap things up, here are some recent trends our design team has felt inspired by. Let us know if any of them inspire you for your next issue!

Illustration on photos

Partial cutouts

Tactile elements

Duotone illustrations

Bold palettes carried from photos to infographics

Collage and paper textures with unfinished edges

Playing with opacity

Art nouveau motifs

Liz Herrera Lauer is Creative Director at Innovative Publishing. She can be reached at liz@innovativepublishing.com.

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