10 Tips For Designing High-Impact Magazines

1. Introduction

Watch video lesson (1 min) ↗

Great magazines are a balance of content and design. Delivering content in a cohesive and interesting way is important to drive up sales and to provide a unique experience for the readers. In this course we'll cover 10 tips to take a regular magazine design to a high-end one. Let's begin!

Laura Keung, video instructor

2. Don’t Be Shy With Your Cover Designs

Watch video lesson (4 min) ↗

One of the basics of magazine design is the cover. The most aesthetically pleasing magazines always have great covers. There’s no point spending time perfecting the inside pages of your magazine if casual browsers don’t pick up the issue to take a look. An attention-grabbing magazine cover design is vital for selling your magazine to readers and inviting them to delve deeper into the publication.

That being said, your magazine cover design doesn’t need to be brash. A rainbow spectrum of color and an over-packed layout can look dated and cheap, but balanced, strong headers and sub-headings paired with simple graphic callouts draw attention to cool magazine covers in a subtler way. 

Try sticking to the A B C rule, which is used by the designers of the most creative magazine covers. 

Stick to one A-heading (the magazine title), one strong (B) sub-heading (pulling out one article to be the main focus), and a larger selection of smaller (C) sub-headings. Almost every magazine cover uses this rule to promote balance in the layout. 

Pair these headings with a strong, simple photograph and areas of white space (where you place no busy text or images), and you have a layout that’s both pleasant to look at and graphically very bold.

Stick with black-and-white photography for a strong look that still looks balanced and stylish. Look to slab serif and display typefaces set in uppercase characters, as in this stylish fashion magazine spread, to make text pop against your main photo.

Allowing photos to ‘interact’ with typography is also a great way of making cool magazine covers appear more 3D and giving the impression that the photo is jumping out at you. Cut the subject of the photo away from the background, and layer them so that parts of the subject are brought in front of text and others behind. Check out this tutorial on how to create a magazine cover in Adobe InDesign and Photoshop that uses this effect:

• Design a Fashion Magazine Cover in Adobe InDesign Grace Fussell 02 Dec 2014

3. Go Minimal for Fashion Magazines

Watch video lesson (5 min) ↗

If you’re creating a magazine for fashion or lifestyle content, your challenge will lie in making the design look as on-trend and aspirational as possible. 

A minimalist design is a great blank canvas for fashion photos and retail showcases, and it taps into the trend for ultra-simple, stylish print design. It's the best design for magazines about these topics.

Here are the basics of magazine design: make photos the focus of your layouts, allowing them to take up at least two-thirds of each page. Pair them with a bare white or pastel backdrop and rich black typography, as in this stylish fashion magazine template.