Magazine Redesign - Refining spreads for print

In a recent convocation with Holly Catford a designer for Esterson Associates who has been designing for Pit magazine, Eye Magazine and recently History Today. I asked if she knew any high quality (reasonably priced) printers and she suggested ripe digital showing a mock up of Pit Magazine she had printed there. The quality was great and they did good deals for students. So I began contacting Ripe about the print run.

I initially called and asked if they would be able to get it done within my tight deadline.

This then followed onto some convocations about paper, printing and formatting. I decided a Matt finish would best suit the magazines design style. As well as the overall classy/contemporary design aesthetic.

I was given a print estimate and some formatting requirements, this meant doing some changed to how I set up my document.


Once this had been realised I checked my document over and decided on a few changes, firstly as it would be perfect bound, there needed to be more space around the edges especially in the crease, changing the whole documents margin to 12mm would be better suited to the printed style, furthermore this would effect the grid. I knew that having it professionally printed meant I needed to pay more attention to the typographic details of the magazine, changing the text to not hyphenated.

Also changing the drop caps, the use of correct drop caps is something I had not experienced before and shows how important this project has been in learning how to do correct editorial design. I went through each spread and ensured that every detail was correct and the spacing was even, as well as each spread was high quality and consistent. The spreads bellow show the finalised document ready for print, the level of quality is greatly improved and overall technical level of design has been changed for the better.