Better design on a lower budget

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April, 1989 by Christopher Sloan

Better design on a lower budget

What would you do if one day you were asked to cut the costs of your magazine by one-half and change its editorial direction, without lowering the established standards of a high quality publication? This was the culmination of a series of events experienced by the staff of FE: The magazine for financial executives, formerly a monthly publication of financial Executives Institute (FEI), a membership association of 13,500 senior financial executives with headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey.

A creative challenge

For both editors and designers, it was perhaps the most dramatic, creative challenge of their careers. After repeated efforts to bring costs into conformity with revenue, the association's executive board said that the Institute's award-winning flagship publication had to change. It was costing too much. As often happens in the magazine publishing field, the hoped-for advertising revenue just wasn't coming in. In addition, the magazine was featuring subject matter that was too broad based, and was playing down the practical concerns of its readers.

In its place, an entirely new magazine was to be created. The new publication would place its emphasis on more timely and practical subject matter. This editorial transformation would be coordinated with a completely fresh graphic approach, as well as a new name. Most important, the magazine's cost controls would be strictly adhered to. Our new graphic plan had to be achieved within a much tighter budget.

All this was to be accomplished in a few short weeks by a team led by editor Robert Parker, FEI's director of communications. His team comprised only three other full-time magazine professionals: the associate editor, the art director and the circulation/ advertising director.

Shifting the magazine from a monthly schedule to bimonthly became one obvious way to control costs. But a few minutes with a calculator showed us that further cuts would be necessary to meet the budget. The magazine would have to be stripped of most of its color. We would have to abandon the 70-pound sheetfed stock we'd been using and move to a lower quality 50-pound sheet on a web press. We'd also have to go from a $5,000-per-issue illustration budget to, well, peanuts.

Once the cost-cutting, number crunching, fingernail-biting sessions were behind us, the task of redesigning the new magazine remained. By coincidence, this crisis hit us while we were in the middle of investigating the possibility of applying desktop publishing technology to some of the association's books and promotional literature. Little did we know that the magazine, which under normal circumstances would be the last publication to shift from traditional to desktop methods, was to become the guinea pig!

Going desktop

We immediately saw that the savings desktop publishing promised could be used to give us just a little more flexibility within the new budget parameters. Desktop publishing would also become a critical factor in implementing the design decisions for the new magazine.

However, because computerized page design on personal computers was still relatively new at the time, we decided that the best approach would be to adopt the new technology--but to ease into it. The new design would take advantage of desktop publishing's known strengths, such as its flexibility and wrap-around capabilities. But it would avoid areas where desktop publishing was falling short of conventional methods, such as with justified text and halftone reproduction.

Three significant design features that we settled on correspond with what desktop publishing has to offer. . We wanted to have a flexible column-width grid in the feature well. This took advantage of the easy manner in which desktop design programs can change column widths of text. Editors would be freed from the fears of having to cut or add large amounts of copy to a story. If the story is too short, make the columns narrower. If it's too long, make the columns wider. . A typeface had to be selected from among the PostScript fonts available at that time. As luck would have it, one of Adobe's early releases was Garamond, which we had already been seriously considering because other FEI materials used it exclusively. . Type would be set rag-right or rag-left. At the time, it was too difficult to make justified desktop text look good.

Another important factor that figured into the overall magazine appearance was our interest in maintaining an aura of high quality. If we couldn't do it with four-color illustrations, photography and display type, we'd have to think of something else.

Our solution was to load the magazine with white space and take a very conservative approach to headline typography. There would be a two-inch margin of white space above and below the body of text. The side margins would vary because of the flexible grid, but they would always be endowed with ample white space. Feature headlines, decks and bylines would follow a strict format that would give them a uniform appearance. No one story would shout louder than another.