Awards contests are the term paper/finals of the publishing industry. As a custom media company, Hammock enters a number of contests each year, and we’ve done well. Entering a competition is a true team effort – at the minimum you involve at least one editor, a writer, and a designer, More often, you have to pull everyone in and engage in serious discussions about your product and about strategy.
That takes a lot of time – and the fact that competition sponsors often extend the deadlines testifies that most companies go down to the wire to get the job done. If you’ve done it, you know. If not, I’m here to help you through the process.
Over more than 21 years with custom media firms, I have somehow regularly drawn the award entry wrangling duty. So I feel that I can speak as an expert when it comes to making it to the FedEx collection center just before closing.
Here are my tips for my fellow competition wranglers:
Jon Henshaw, the SEO guru (among many other things) at the web-development firm Sitening, says some very nice things about the online strategy displayed on Hammock.com. Thanks, Jon. We feel like Sally Field receiving an Oscar.
You can’t be too careful with stock photos.
One wonders how much time the Birmingham City Council – of England – has spent actually out and about in their own city, after the council authorized and issued a brochure bearing a picture of Birmingham – Alabama.
The British city fathers tried the old “we were just looking for something generic” excuse, but that sounded pretty lame, given they were praising their citizens for recycling efforts. Surely they had a nice shot of their town someplace?
It’s a cautionary tale for those of us who use stock photos. Consumer Reports readers often point out instances where the same stock image has been used for similar, or even competing, products and services. I know I have seen the woman in the center probably 10 times over the past few years, advertising jewelry, cosmetics and face lifts.
Some years ago, at another company, we were asked to do a story on a client’s newest acquisition – a mortgage processing firm. The acquisition’s corporate brochure had a cover photo of those lovely Victorian homes in San Francisco known as “the Painted Ladies.” Upon close examination, it was clear there was a guy in his Fruit-of-the-Looms standing in a window. We never told the client, since the brochure was dumped right after the acquisition.
First, the obvious: Magazines set out to tell a story.
Then: But the words you see printed on the page are only part of the tale. Those of us trained as writers and editors (and many in the general population) usually think that a “story” is told with written or spoken words.
But just think how a verbally told story is enhanced by these factors:
Similarly, your sense of a magazine article is also enhanced by its setting — the page layout.
I talked to our design team recently about the importance of white space in magazine design. I’ve marked up a spread with their comments on Flickr.
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.
Hammock has some really talented designers — and I’m not one of them. So I asked our art director, Kerri Davis, to help me understand what goes into the font choices designers make when they’re laying out a spread in a magazine.
I tend to think things I don’t understand are just magic — don’t we all? But Kerri shared with me the guidelines she follows as she starts her work. The end result still looks magic to me, but we can all learn from the method behind it.
I took Kerri’s notes and marked up two spreads that I posted on Flickr. Click over to see her thoughts.
More: Seth Godin also had a great post this week on using fonts and type effectively.
Back in December I wrote about my issue with the way The New York Times presented its “53 Places to Go in 2008” cover article for its Travel section. I explained how the digital version of the same article was far superior because of its clear and logical organization, not only in the presentation of the information but also the design.
Imagine my dismay therefore, yesterday morning, to flip to the Travel section to the “31 Places to Go this Summer” cover article to see a repeat violation. The headline grabbed my attention, but the design is another disappointment. It’s visually entertaining, creative and playful, but it doesn’t serve my need for access to the information in a concise way. I am not engaged. I quickly remembered that not all was lost as I quickly clicked on my nytimes.com bookmark. Sweet relief yet again. While the Times fails in print, it succeeds to surpass my needs with the online version of the article. The design copies that from the December article: All 31 places are presented with a small thumbnail image. Now, where will I go this summer?
Working on lots of long-term magazine projects, we don’t select new fonts all that often, particularly when it comes to body copy. In general, you choose a font for the body copy of your publication, and you stick with it, unless it’s time for a big redesign. And a lot of times, you still stick with it after a redesign.
Because a body copy font is such a long-term commitment, we are very careful when we’re choosing one. I sat down with our design team recently to get their insights on what makes a great body copy font for a magazine.
