Have you ever picked up a magazine or a book that just drew you in at first glance? Maybe it was the vibrant colors, the striking layout, or the seamless blend of text and imagery. There’s an art and science to this captivating allure, and it’s all to do with editorial design.
In this blog, we’ll dive into the world where creativity meets functionality. We’ll explore what makes certain publications stand out in a sea of content and uncover the secrets behind their design magic. From innovative magazines that push the boundaries to books that tell stories through more than just words, get ready to discover the fascinating art that makes these works so visually compelling.
So if you’re in the fashion, hotel, tourism, food, or any industry that works with editorial design, stay tuned. We will take on this subject to understand and appreciate the art of editorial design and learn how you can apply these insights to your own projects.
But first, let’s get down to brass tacks and tackle everything you need to know about what exactly editorial design is and its value.
Graphic design is a vast subject that spans across different branches. Out of these different branches editorial design is one. Editorial design has to do with how a designer works on a publication design such as books, magazines, articles, newspapers, catalogs, leaflets, brochures, covers, and anything with text-heavy compositions.
It’s all to do with how you mix and lay out text and images within a given space. There are many principles that you must consider when you design editorial content. We will speak about that shortly but it’s important to remember that editorial design is what’s responsible for making a publication a good piece of design. And good editorial design helps you easily peruse the contents of publications.
A good designer knows what things to be considerate about when they design editorial work.
Let’s take a look at these important things next.
There are a few components that come together to form what we call a complete publication design. These components are namely, the cover, a table of contents, a headline, subheadings, bylines, the body where the majority of the text appears, accompanying images, relevant captions for said images, and panels.
To organize all of these components effectively you need to follow a set of key design principles. These principles are common for any kind of graphic design but for editorial design, it’s even more crucial since the latter involves a lot of content. If it’s not organized in the right way, it will just be a big undecipherable mess.
So here are briefly, the key design principles of editorial design you need to look out for and some examples to help you visualize them:
In editorial work, the text has to be easy on the eyes. So there are various tweaks you can make to letters and words to implement this. Thus, typography is the part of graphic design that focuses on the arranging of letters and texts.
When it comes to editorial design it’s very important to pick fonts that are readable at smaller sizes because most publications would have large chunks of text. It’s also important to consider if your publication is digital or print because the font you use has an effect on readability in these 2 separate mediums.
Other parts of typography like leading which is the space between lines and tracking also play a vital role in making text legible. Adjusting these things accordingly will ensure that readers can glide through the text smoothly.
One other important part of typography in editorial design is the number of fonts you choose. It’s best to choose the 3-4 font combinations. This practice keeps everything uncluttered and clean making the reading a delightfully smooth experience.
Take a look at the example below that uses less than 4 fonts:
Of course, you can move outside this practice for things like flyers, brochures, and cover pages depending on your publication’s tone and choice of audience.
Here’s an example of the famous magazine Cosmopolitan that deviates from this practice for the cover page:
You may have already come across this term. What it means is the order in which elements within a design composition are organized to help guide the viewer’s eye in a specific order of importance. Simply, visual hierarchy is used to implement the intended reading order.
Layout, proportion, emphasis, alignment, and movements are all part of what helps set a visual hierarchy between elements. This system is followed by all good designers in all branches of graphic design. Why it’s so important with editorial design is that there’s a lot of content as we frequently pointed out. It’s very important to help your readers glide through the content in the right order.
A magazine spread, for example, can be “digested” in a single glance because our peripheral vision takes in the entire layout at a normal viewing distance. But this digestion gets confusing if the right visual hierarchy isn’t maintained.
You may feel like this is something difficult to achieve, what with so much content. But the grid system is a great way to help you align and layout elements in the right proportion and way.
We will talk about where you can access a grid system when creating editorial design later on in this blog, but here’s one example of a grid system:
Other ways that designers achieve visual hierarchy are by experimenting with different font sizes, and colors or using vertical layouts for titles, etc.
Here’s a creative way to arrange the title for maximum visual hierarchy impact within the inside pages of a magazine:
Color is an important part of editorial design. What about color makes it important, you may ask? Color helps achieve contrasts between letters and the background. Besides, color also helps set the tone of the design since different colors have different moods.
Most publications come in monochrome – black, and white. The high contrast between the white and black makes reading easier. For example, in some books and especially in newspapers, you’d find pages in plain white and the text in black which even earned the New York Times the name Grey Lady. And for so many years people have been reading them without a problem.
With the advent of color printing, most newspaper publications including the New York Times shifted to using colored images but still maintained the monochrome color palette for texts and backgrounds as shown below:
However, the story is quite different when it comes to editorial design work such as magazines, leaflets, and catalogs. Yes, white and black monochromatic still dominate the white pages inside most magazines but now there are a lot of colored backgrounds and images used instead of white solid backgrounds. And the use of colored images, calls for the use of various high-contrast colored texts.
Here’s an excellent example of a centerspread that uses high-contrast colored texts against an image:
So experiment with color contrast to help your readers easily decipher texts. After all, the right color contrasts add to the visual appeal.
When you think of editorial design it’s very important to have a good balance between texts, images, and any other component. White space is something that helps achieve such a good balance. We’re not trying to say that balance means equal white space between elements. Rather, we’re encouraging the creative and intelligent incorporation of white space when you design editorial content.
It’s best to show it in action and then talk about it.
In this inside page of a magazine, the designer has kept a lot of white space for aesthetic appeal allowing the image to shine. The text is laid out on the right side and at the normal reading size it’s legible and readable.
This next magazine cover idea is by Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.
It uses white space in such a creative manner to make a point. Readers who see the cover design would surely want to pick it up out of curiosity.
These are the kinds of creative ways you can use white space in your editorial design projects.
It would seem incorrect to just conclude by saying that following the above key design principles would be enough. There’s still more that needs to go into when you design editorial work.
Here are some interesting tips to keep in mind when you create editorial design projects.
Before you start working on editorial design it’s best to understand the preferences of your audience. What age group do they fall into, do you have a gender-specific audience, which geographical location are they from are important questions to seek answers to. Because these things determine the design styles that you adopt for your publication.
For example, if your audience is girls aged between 13-19 then the colors, fonts, and layouts you use will highly differ as opposed to what you use on publications for a more mature audience focused on entrepreneurship, business, and careers.
So the outlook is very important in editorial design projects. Let’s take a look at 2 very different magazines. Both magazines are quite famous but cater to 2 entirely different demographics – the Times magazine and the Seventeen magazine.
Here’s a look at the Times magazine cover pages for 2024:
As you can see they have a rather serious cover page design centered around famous people. They follow a minimalist design approach that exudes luxury and a professional aesthetic. The use of fonts, colors, professional images, and effects helps achieve this look.
Here’s the latest edition of the Seventeen magazine:
This is the polar opposite of the previous cover page for the Times. The Seventeen magazine always featured a pop sensation thriving at the time but in a more cavalier manner. From the image of the pop icon to the burst of colors to the multiple fonts and creative layout, it alludes to the relevant audience to pick it up or click on it with sheer interest.
The above examples both consist of text and a celebrity to feature. But how they bring these elements together sets them apart from each other. They each exude a different vibe because of the different demographics they target.
If your marketing calls for editorial design, you need to use good design software to work on proper publication projects.
While there are a lot of options, the top design software we recommend for editorial design projects is Adobe InDesign.
InDesign offers professional layout capabilities. These capabilities allow for precise control over design elements in your publications. Some of these features include grid systems, master pages, and flexible text and image placements. Having these kinds of features especially when you have to design editorial projects with multiple pages is so important.
Here’s a look at the grids option in InDesign:
This grid can be customized based on your requirements.
And since InDesign is a part of the Adobe Creative Suite, you can easily integrate applications like Photoshop and Illustrator making it so easy to incorporate images and graphics. This interoperability helps streamline tedious tasks like putting together a publication with heavy text blocks and complex images.
There’s a lot of typography control on InDesign too. The tool provides a lot of typography tools that let you make adjustments to things like tracking, leading, and kerning as well as customize fonts.
All these advantages make it one of the best tools to design editorial work.
Designs and layouts can change when it comes to brochures, leaflets, and one-time publication projects. But for recurring publications like magazines, newspapers, catalogs, and book series, it’s best to follow an important tip called repetition.
Once you’ve decided on the aesthetic that you plan on following and you have a clear set of brand guidelines, it’s best to keep following a repeated design format in terms of typography, layout, and structure. The reason is that if your publication is a recurring one, readers get used to the way things are laid out and pick up on the pattern.
This familiarity is what you need to give your readers as it builds trust and fosters a reliable spirit. Consistent visual design helps increase sales by 33%.
Let’s take a look at some examples of popular magazines that have been following this tip:
These are the National Geographic magazine issues during the year 2023. Even if you look back a few more years you’d see that the overall design structure remains intact. Look at the consistent placement of the title and the familiar yellow border around the cover.
Now repetition doesn’t mean redundancy. Here’s an excellent example of a magazine that showcases this:
The Popular Science magazine has been around since the 1800s. And even though they don’t produce it anymore the magazine is a great inspiration particularly the cover pages that showcase various designs. They have taken artistic freedom over each cover page as is evident from just the few cover pages shown above. But notice, the placement of the Popular Science title has always been on the left top corner. This makes it easily recognizable even when the font is different.
Similarly consistent branding and repetition of layouts and structures are a great method to follow for repeating editorial design content.
And with that, we can bring things to a close.
We believe that this blog explains the core of what editorial design is and how to properly design editorial content. The examples we’ve featured should also help you get some inspiring ideas for your own editorial design projects. As we wrap up, we encourage using expert designers who have worked with editorial content and have sufficient experience with tools like InDesign. Here’s a blog to help you find an expert designer for your publication work.
