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.
A magazine article is only as good as its source. But breaking into unfamiliar territory to find the perfect source is no easy task. Where do you turn when searching for a source takes you on a wild goose chase? After a number of trials and errors, we’ve adopted a few general rules to help us find good sources fast.
Here are some tips that work for us:
In the corporate world, design and logo guidelines are standard. Companies and associations set up rules about how the logo may be used, for instance, or what colors are acceptable in company memos. Many organizations will just provide standard templates for spreadsheets, written documents and emails.
But what about your words? Does your organization need a standard style guide for the words in your written documents? If your publications don’t use a style guide, follow along with me for a few moments. Even presentations, advertisements and other printed materials benefit from a standard written style.
A complex sentence is made up of two clauses: one independent clause (a simple sentence) which can stand on its own, and one dependent clause that would simply be a fragment if left alone. The dependent clause also contains the subordinating conjunction (the word which ties the two clauses together). Subordinating conjunctions are words such as “because,” “although,” “if,” “when,” “unless,” etc. Are you still awake?
A common error occurs with this type of sentence though because there seems to be confusion on where exactly to pencil in the pesky little comma. The rule is simple:
It’s a common mistake, and one that slipped by me recently, to describe the firing of three volleys of 7 rifles as at military funerals as a 21-gun salute. It’s not.
A 21-gun salute is fired by pieces of artillery, not by rifles. According to the Navy’s History Division, “Today, the national salute of 21 guns is fired in honor of a national flag, the soverign or chief of state of a foreign nation, a member of a reigning royal family, and the President, ex-President, and President-elect of the United States. It is also fired at noon of the day of the funeral of a President, ex-President, or President-elect, on Washington’s Birthday, Presidents Day, and the Fourth of July. On Memorial Day, a salute of 21 minute guns is fired at noon while the flag is flown at half mast.”
The rifle salute can be described as a “three-volley salute”.
What seems to confuse so many folks is that civilians tend to think of a rifle as a gun – whereas gun has a more precise meaning as a piece of artillery.
Just last week, my mind was having a little battle between the words “maximum” and “maximal,” and it was driving me crazy. I had typed each word out a few dozen times as I wrote and rewrote a story. I had stared at them both for so long that they no longer even looked like words to me. So, to end the battle, I turned to the best resource I know for answering tough grammar questions: my colleagues here at Hammock.
To me, there is no better resource than the smart folks around me for hammering out the proper use of a hyphen. We talk about it over lunch, from opposite ends of the hallway. And, as you’ve heard us mention before, we use Instant Messenger to talk about pronouns and dependent clauses as much as we use it to discuss last night’s episode of LOST.
But when some of us are up to our necks in a project or out of the office for lunch (or sleep), where do we go when our deepest thoughts about the subjunctive mood just won’t rest?
Online, you’ll find us logged on to:
Off the shelf, you might find us grabbing:
There are dozens of other great resources out there. What’s your favorite?
Bill’s post earlier this week celebrated all that we love about magazines and their punny, punny headlines. But you’ll notice here (“How to Write Headlines for the Web”) we’re playing it straight. And there’s good reason for that.
When you’re titling articles, posts and features online, your headline has to do a lot more than look pretty and act clever. Since headlines may show up as links, and often help with search engine results, they have to cut to the chase: Just tell us what the page is about.
Headline writers are like diners at The Old Country Buffet – they go right for the good stuff, and you’d best not stand in their way. There is no pun, no quibble, no stretch or rhyme or reason, no shaken-and-stirred metaphor they won’t resort to in their quest to stop readers dead in their tracks. I know: I’m Bill, and I am a headline writer.
I wasn’t always this way, although the underlying fascination with groaners and shaggy dog stories was there from the start. When I worked as a reporter and later editor at the late Nashville Banner, the copy editors appended most of the headlines to our articles. They sat roughly in an inward facing square near the city desk, and we could hear them murmuring and often cackling amongst themselves as they clarified our prose and debated zinger headlines.
There were many – and many that did not make it into the paper. Such a one was proposed for a wire story about a woman who had murdered her husband and stuffed his carcass under the house. “I’m walking the floor over you!” sang out a merry voice from the copy desk, convulsing the entire newsroom. The one headline I remember as the all-time greatest was about a grisly local murder whose perpetrator tried to cover up with arson: “Headless body found in gutted church.” If “Wayne’s World” had been out then, we would all have salaamed in appreciation.
But since assuming editorship over various titles at Hammock Publishing, I had to get into the headline business. Turns out I have something of a knack for it, and my colleagues sometimes ask me to swot out a headline for them.
[After the jump, read more about the joys of headlining.]
Have you ever gotten an e-mail where someone asked you to confirm your shipping address to insure that your package arrives on time? What about a message telling you that your vote could drastically effect the outcome of a race?
These types of mistakes are all too common. In fact, as I type this in Word, its spell-checking system recognizes that one of the examples above is wrong, but not the other.
Here is a list of some of the worst offenders I’ve seen lately:
Our friend Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 has released a new white paper called “New Rules of Custom Publishing – New Complimentary White Paper: Nine Strategies to Create a World-Class Content Marketing Company.” You can download the white paper in a digital format here.
After the jump, read Joe’s list of Nine strategies to create a world-class content marketing company. As anyone who follows Hammock Inc., it’s no surprise we agree with each one of them: