When the night has come/And the land is dark/
And the moon is the only light we’ll see …
The opening lines to Ben E. King’s classic song “Stand By Me” describe the situation American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan face every night when their enemies are on the move. Fortunately, the U.S. leads the world in night-vision technology, which helps deny the bad guys their would-be invisibility cloak.
“Magazine” originally meant a storehouse for supplies — especially weapons and ammunition. So magazines held a variety of things in all shapes and sizes. For most people today, “magazine” means a periodic publication filled with — you guessed it — a variety of items in all shapes and sizes. Today, small is the new big.
Editors kick the word “style” around a lot. Like spoken Chinese, what we mean often depends on the context and inflection. We work diligently to create and maintain style in its various meanings, but like all rules, style sometimes improves when you break it.
Sometimes style refers to a publication’s “style guide.” Ours is based on the Associated Press stylebook, but customized for different clients. For instance, our clients tend to treat elements like titles, dates and state names in different ways:
The point is that every publication has its own set of style rules for consistency in spelling, grammar, even the tense used in attributed quotations.
Then there are times when “style” refers to the overall voice — some call it sound or tone or feeling — of a publication. The style guide can have an effect on this:
For instance, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal use titles before names. So one reads about Mayor Michael Bloomberg on first reference, then Mr. Bloomberg thereafter. The tone is more formal, not so much deferential as polite. Quite different from, say, Rolling Stone.
My friend Albert Roberts (no relation—that we know of!) is a re-enactor at Historic Mansker’s Station, an authentic reconstruction of a 1779 frontier settlement in Goodlettsville, Tenn. He received word late last week that the city is closing Mansker’s Station on June 30 due to budget cuts.
Several years ago, American Spirit, the magazine we publish for the DAR, covered the fort’s annual Yule Fest, a celebration of an early American Christmas. The fort’s dedicated re-enactors and authentic living history demonstrations have made the 18th century come alive for thousands of visitors. We believe it’s a site worth preserving, and we’re happy to hear that the volunteers at Mansker’s Station are rallying to keep it open. Learn more at Albert’s, excuse me, the Doctor’s blog.
While I’m plugging friends’ good causes, I wanted to send a shout-out to Gin Phillips, Hammock freelance writer extraordinaire. On Wednesday, June 25, she’ll be reading from and signing her first novel, The Well and the Mine, at local independent bookstore Davis-Kidd. Set in 1931, her book follows one family in an Alabama coal-mining town after a nine-year-old girl sees a woman throw a baby down the family well. The novel touches on death, race, hard work and family in the Depression-era South.
Gin is already enjoying positive buzz: Award-winning Southern novelist Fannie Flagg wrote the introduction, the book got a great review in O magazine and Gin was named one of Barnes and Noble’s “Discover Great New Writers.” Check her out if you’re in the neighborhood!
The late NBC political bureau chief Tim Russert, who passed away last week, was famous for the behind-the-scenes preparation he put into interviews on his weekly show, “Meet the Press.” He never interviewed politicians without knowing every stance they’d taken, every vote they’d cast or every statement they’d made on the record. Even America’s most celebrated interviewer, Barbara Walters, doesn’t wing it. After poring through research on her subject, she jots her questions down on index cards, and shuffles and reshuffles until she finds the right order.
Maybe your next interview isn’t with a politician or a celebrity, but preparation is still important because it gives you the credibility you need to connect with whomever you interview. Sure, you’ll run into some sound-bite-friendly folks who are natural talkers and will give you great quotes no matter what you ask. But it’s a better bet that you’ll have to deal with awkward silences, canned responses, hidden agendas and occasional egos—so you must be ready. Read on for five tried-and-true steps we use to prepare for an interview.
A visually arresting image is the first thing readers notice about a cover, as Art Director Kerri Davis explains in this post. But in that brief moment of attention you also have to have the right words to whet their appetites and invite them to actually open the issue and sample all the delicious content. So how do we make ’em dig in?
Word games. Cover blurb time is word play time at Hammock. Depending on the audience, we might play with puns (“Arts, Cynics and Old Lace” promotes the history of the lace-making industry), tease with phrases that carry double meanings (“Iron Lady” profiles the woman who helped build the Brooklyn Bridge) or play it straight with needed solutions (“Beat Burnout”) or timely information (“Warriors’ Weekend”).
Promises, promises. Who doesn’t want to be better, stronger, faster, smarter? We try not to over-do it, but if we can deliver the goods to help our readers do their jobs or live their lives more successfully, we’ll promote it with blurbs like “7 Steps to Faster Growth,” “10 Ways to Save Gas” or even “How to Cook a Colonial Breakfast.” That said, we don’t over-promise–if it’s not the first time we’ve done this or if she’s not the only woman to have done that, we won’t say so just for the hook.
I’m talking to you. We question, listen to and study our audiences to learn what topics they want to read about most–and then give the people what they want. What excites our readers? Do they enjoy stories about genealogy? We’ll use related words on the cover to signal, “Hey, we heard you! Take a look at this story about finding your family photos online.”
Want more? Take a look at this expanded post on Hammock’s Custom Media Craft blog.
We’re talking about what makes a great cover today at Hammock. We follow some guidelines when we design a cover, but there’s a lot of feel to it, as well. I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts here.
Fonts
I like to use bold fonts to deliver a sense of confidence and authority. A narrow font could appear wimpy. I also like to play with the size of the main headline on the cover. I usually like to see it really small and then blow it up really big to see what direction to go.
Juxtaposing the image and the banner
If you have a person on the cover, it’s important to play with the size and crop. Sometimes you have to figure out how much of the banner you can cover up and still be able to read it. With national titles, that’s not so important. Time or Sports Illustrated could cover most of the banner and still have an effective, instantly recognizable cover, but with our custom magazines and our clients, seeing the banner clearly is more important.
The role of the banner
A lot of our banners stay the same color from issue to issue. If they do change, finding the right color for that is very important. Sometimes, I like for the banner to blend in more with the image so that the focus is on the person. I don’t want the color of the banner to overpower the image in any way.
Color
You also need to be careful choosing colors for other text blocks on the cover. You don’t want it to look like a Crayola box. I usually keep the colors choices to about two or three colors, with white or black being the main choice.
Finding the right person and shot
When a person is on the cover, their expression has to be engaging. You just know when you see a cover expression. Something about the eyes making a connection or the tilt of the head or the body posture.
When you receive a magazine in the mail, or purchase one at the newsstand, it’s easy not to notice the many elements in common that most magazines share. There is a bit of science behind the art of building a good cover. Check some recent covers we have published to see our notes on the science of a cover — the standard elements that most covers share in common:
But the art of a cover remains more elusive, more difficult to nail down. The same elements go into a mundane magazine cover and into an award-winning one. What’s the difference between blah and wow?
I asked Jamie Roberts, our editorial director, and Kerri Davis, our art director, to give me some insight into the thoughts and planning that go into an award-winning magazine cover.
I didn’t count them, but I bet the June/July issue of MyBusiness, the member magazine we publish for the National Federation of Independent Business, has more than 100 tips on how to protect your business from, well, anything and everything.
From a natural disaster to employee theft to bad-for-business regulations, the threats facing the small business owners we interviewed for this issue are real and could happen to any business any day. Just ask Nichole Yarbrough, owner of Shepherd, Texas-based Shepherd Auto Sales, whom we talked to for the Crisis Averted feature. In one day, everything she worked to create was taken from her when a thief stole her purse, which contained credit cards, checks, $5,000 in cash and more than 40 car titles. It was a rough two months putting the pieces back together, but she survived and has since learned the important lesson of protecting her business from theft by backing up data (and not keeping car titles in her purse, of course!).
Turn a few pages past Yarbough’s story and you’ll meet Michael Nevins, who is fighting a much different kind of threat—a challenging small business climate in Michigan, where his business, Full Spectrum Solutions, is located. Nevins uses his involvement in NFIB as a shield to combat onerous regulations. In this article, he explains why his commitment to NFIB is so important.
Also check out the MyBusiness Manual: the Essential Guide to Safeguarding Your Business, where you’ll find tips on assessing your insurance needs, how to prepare for an OSHA inspection and protecting your business against hackers and scammers.
For this and more, check out the “Current Issue” section of www.mybusinessmag.com.
A few weeks ago my two- and a half-year old Motorola Razor’s screen turned white. After troubleshooting ended in failure, I was forced to make a trip to the Verizon store. As soon as I walked in the door, I was bombarded with questions: Was I looking for a phone with email capabilities? “No.” What about MP3 capabilities? “No,” I responded again. The salesperson’s dismay was obvious. “What about the ability to watch TV?” At this point I simply replied, “I just need to be able to call people.”
I consider myself a fairly technologically savvy person, thanks to colleagues Rex and Patrick R. who keep me up-to-date on the latest and greatest tools and products, but when it comes to my cell phone I just want the basics. What I realized after my shopping experience, however, is that these days wanting a cell phone that is just a phone puts me in the minority.
I’ve recently posted about how Rodale and Hearst publishers have taken advantage of the reality that most of us are literally physically attached to our phones. If you’re like me, if I forget my cell phone at home, my day feels off until I’m reunited with it. With this reality in mind, and in an effort to serve the needs of advertisers who are demanding deeper levels of engagement, calls to action, new ideas and measureable ROI, these publishers have rolled out the SnapTell and ShopText technologies to many of their titles. These code-enabled advertisements allow readers to buy items or receive promotions via text.
Today, magazine readers utilize their cell phone’s camera and texting features to take advantage of the promotions offered by these text-enabled ads, but that’s just the beginning. Based on the success of these campaigns to date, I predict there will be more to come—more publishers offering more technology and more advertisers buying in. If my cell-phone-buying experience is any indication, developers are already building the next advancement that will connect readers to the magazine print ad via cell phone, elevating the interactiveness of the magazine print ad and signaling the ad campaigns of the future.