Design Department and Feature Templates

This diagram shows the basics of a random magazine.
Make variations and try to cover as many corners as possible.

Design department and feature templates.

In real life, every section of a magazine has a template and the designer would pull that particular section's template and fill it with new content. They don't do everything over and over each time. This saves them time and designing templates for your magazine will save you time, too. You will be determining the structure and what your type combinations are ultimately going to be.

TEMPLATE GUIDELINES

* Design your templates in single sheets as right hand pages.
* Do not use photography or illustration or any gray boxes.
* Decide; trim size of your mag (keep in mind your printing options), the margins, how many columns you will use, the baseline grid, gutter, column width and where your hangline should be.

* Decide the hierarchy between these graphic elements, the distance between them, etc.

Feature templates contain; a headline, a subhead, a byline, body copy (text type), folio line, captions and credit line.

Department templates contain; a headline, a subhead, a byline, body copy, rubric, folio line, captions and credit line and a hangline where your text falls under.

* Make variations of layouts so that you'd have alternatives to choose from.
* Include all details such as drop caps, lead-ins, captions, pull quotes, photo credits, etc. The more you figure out now, the less you'll have to later.
* Print with the grid.
* Do not use Lorem Ipsum. You may copy some text online but make sure you use something related to your topic.
* Keep in mind that the text type is the same throughout the magazine to hold everything together. You'll make variations however you'll pick one eventually and go with it. So try as many as possible.
* Kern your headlines.
* Read Genevieve's Editorial Design Book PDF for further guidance.
* Post on your blog.
* Print on decent paper that has high brightness. Pick something that's not going to make the ink bleed much. Bring everything to class. (I believe hammermill is good enough, if you know other papers please share)

We want 20 variation 20 for department and 20 for feature templates at least. Try variations of text faces. Check out our favorite typefaces to starter with.

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