THE JOY OF INK

Consider what you've got in your hands. Feel the paper, flick through the pages. It might seem obvious but a magazine is a physical thing, and that tangibility remains its unique selling point in a world overflowing with digital information. All four of the experts TEN4 gathered together agreed on this – even if they had heated debates about much else.

Verdicts on the state of the print media industry vary widely. Some commentators point to plummeting ABC circulation figures and ad revenue as evidence that the industry is in terminal decline. Others herald recent success stories, from mainstream launches such as Grazia and Nuts to thriving niche titles like Karen and Marmalade.

What is certain is that the industry is in flux, and must constantly reinvent itself to compete with the Internet. So in many ways, this is the ideal time to get your foot in the door - whether you're a writer, photographer, designer or want to combine all of the above by launching a title yourself, magazines need fresh blood and ideas to steer people away from flickering screens and towards the joys of ink on paper again.

AMELIA GREGORY

Given that Amelia Gregory started Amelia's Magazine as a personal outlet for the things that most interested her, there’s a certain irony in the fact that her publication has practically become her whole life in itself: "It's completely taken over."

"The idea was that I'd do the magazine for six months of the year and then spend the rest on my photography. It was craziness to start it in the first place, and we never break even or make it work financially. But if you're creative you don’t do it for the money, and as a frustrated creative person I felt like I needed an outlet."

It was after attempting to break into the magazine industry through a number of different routes that Amelia decided she might as well do it herself. A trained textile designer, after leaving university she did work experience at magazines like The Face before trying her hand as a freelance stylist and photographer.

"I was struggling to make a career out of it," she admits. "I'd be doing shoots for The Guardian and Sleazenation, but you don't make much money out of editorial and I wasn't getting any commercial work. I'd been talking about starting my own magazine and people were like, 'Yeah, whatever.' I eventually realised I had to do it, because I'd told so many people."

This self-belief is borne out in the fact that Amelia chose to name her magazine after herself. "I suppose it is quite a bold statement," she reflects. "But I wanted something that meant I couldn't hide from it. I wanted people to know that this isn't a corporate thing - it's about the fashion, art and photography that I like and hope other people will like as well."

Following the first issue in May 2004, it's now produced biannually. From the outset Amelia wanted to create something "very personal and collectable," and her attention to detail shines through in every aspect of the magazine. The covers are a defining characteristic: one glows in the dark, another is scratch 'n' sniff - and was featured in the Dutch edition of Elle. And the fact that the print run is just a few thousand only adds to the sense that each issue is lovingly crafted, not simply churned out.

"What draws people to print media is having something you can own; something that you can put on your shelf and say 'this is me' in a way you can't with a website," Amelia believes."Someone said it's a 'mook' - a cross between a magazine and a book. That's a word I hate, but I would like people to treat it with the same respect as a book. The design is very organic and cobbled together from things that inspire me like children's books - I don't really look at magazines."

Amelia does confess though that the magazine's limited print run is as much down to practical considerations as a sense of editorial integrity. "I don't have any financial backing at all, so this is as much as I can cope with," she replies when asked how big she'd like the magazine to become. For although Amelia now has a small team of graphic designers and hand-picked contributors all providing their writing and photography for free, the responsibility for running the magazine as a business still rests squarely on her shoulders.

"I had literally zero knowledge of how to start a magazine," she says. "None of the work I'd done before had taken into account production, management, getting contributions, distribution, advertising or anything like that. I got friends to mock me up PDFs and found printers who’d be prepared to do it quite cheaply in return for some exposure for their company."

"Since it's a specialist magazine I knew I had to get it in Borders, and to do that you need a distributor - who takes a massive cut. I thought it would get easier to find advertising after the first issue but it's actually got harder, and now the stakes are so much higher because the distribution's wider. Each issue just about pays for the one before, basically."

But whilst Amelia clearly wishes she had a better grasp of figures, she's also determined not to let her original reasons for starting Amelia's Magazine become buried under a pile of pie charts and invoices. "You need to develop business skills or have someone do them for you, but without a creative spark a magazine simply wouldn't survive," she argues. "You have to have faith in your own style. If you're a driven person, you will make these things work."

JONATHAN HEAF

As a self-professed "middle-class suburban white kid who loved jungle" Jonathan Heaf was more than a little bored growing up in Surrey during the early '90s. That was until he found something in his local newsagents that transported him away from the manicured green golf courses into a much more colourful world.

"I started reading The Face and i-D and became obsessed with moving to London and joining this gang of people where all these cool things were happening," he recalls. "The covers drew me in, and inside the language was friendly and full of all the things like records and clothes that I liked. I was a magpie for pop culture and this was pure escapism - the knowledge that there were people out there like me."

Currently working for GQ, Jonathan is most definitely one of the gang now. But as the magazine's senior commissioning editor he also decides who else gets to join. Not just the magazine's content, but also the right writers and photographers to do it justice. Of course, with regular contributors of the calibre of AA Gill, competition for GQ's column inches is fierce, but Jonathan stresses that it's original thinking more than a weighty reputation that he's looking for in a pitch.

"As a writer your currency is ideas, and a good idea is a good idea no matter who pitches it," he insists. "The pitch should be as succinct as you can make it - just two lines summarising your idea with a 'sell' standfirst at the beginning. You aren't going to generate original ideas surfing the Internet, and avoid anything celebrity-based because editors already know when the new Batman film is coming out."

"It's ideas where people go and do things - or look at the world in a new way - that get attention. Don't send your portfolio at first because people don't have time to read unsolicited copy, but they'll respond to good ideas. If they like it they'll ask to see what you've done before, but editors would be stupid to turn something good down because someone doesn't have a 'name'. Most remember what it was like when they were starting out."

Jonathan himself made his 'name' at The Face, for whom he worked for four years right until its closure in 2004. With no formal journalistic training - "in fact plenty of people told me I couldn't do it, because it was too competitive" - The Face furnished him with invaluable career skills, which in this business are as much about placating PRs and negotiating office politics between art and editorial as they are about writing, although he believes that a good writer's most important strength can't be taught.

"If you write with passion and sincerity at first, then with practice you become good," he proposes. "It's the idea of journalism as a craft. I used to believe a good writer was someone who dressed every sentence up in long words, but now my ideas have changed. The New Yorker is an amazing magazine from a journalist's point of view. The language is far simpler than something like Dazed and Confused, but that means many more people can understand it. Every sentence is a fact: it's much harder, but much better to write like that than just hide behind crappy language."

Indeed for Jonathan, the secret of good journalism lies not in the words themselves but in the preparation before pen goes to paper. "I'd say it’s about 85 percent research – you should spend much more time researching than actually writing," he advises. "If you're interviewing someone, ask your mates for their opinions of them or phone up people they've worked with before. That way you're basing your writing on more than just your impressions of the hour you spent talking to them."

And knowing your audience is just as important as knowing your subject. For whilst his tastes might have changed since his teenage years "looking at pictures of pretty people" in i-D, Jonathan still recognises that it's a sense of community that a magazine is selling as much as information and opinion.

"When you think of a GQ man you think of a slick, sophisticated, well-educated guy about town," he says. "That kind of brand profile can take years to establish, but even if you're writing for a new magazine you need to have a specific niche reader in mind. Know their ambitions and aspirations so that everything in there is geared towards them. Project the idea of an exclusive club that people can join if they buy this magazine. Then you can draw their attention to things they might be interested in, and present them with authority."

JEREMY LESLIE

Most of us think of magazines as the rows of glossy titles in the newsstands, but the consumer market isn't the only one out there. Be they huge supermarket chains like Sainsbury's or smaller specialist financial firms, companies are increasingly issuing their own bespoke publications to establish a closer connection with their customers.

"There's something special about magazines and the way they communicate with people," enthuses Jeremy Leslie, group creative director at John Brown. "On the one hand you feel like you're joining a community, but on the other your relationship with a magazine is very personal. That works on newsstands and in our market too."

Currently publishing around 50 magazines for 40 different clients including Mothercare, Volkswagen and Which?, John Brown are the main players in a UK customer magazine market valued at around £350-400k a year. Jeremy is ultimately responsible for overseeing them all, and is enthusiastic about the possibilities they provide for the creative staff that produce them.

Having cut his teeth as a designer for consumer titles like City Limits and Blitz during the '80s and '90s, Jeremy has brought that experience to bear on creating magazines that he believes have gone well beyond glorified advertising for the companies that hire John Brown.

"Whilst in many ways customer and consumer are still just magazines, there are obviously differences," Jeremy states. "My experience is more in design than editorial, and I'm absolutely clear that on that side you have more freedom and opportunities to be innovative in customer magazines."

"The newsstand can be very restrictive," he goes on. "If you're seeking to be successful in any manner you're immediately pushed down a certain route. The way the logo is on the cover, the content, the size - everything is dictated by industry norms. Sometimes one of our clients will say they want to mimic a newsstand title like Wallpaper*, but often it can be all about striking out and trying to be different."

Jeremy points to two different magazines John Brown have produced for Virgin Airways as good examples. The first Hot Air, he proposes, was deliberately designed "to compete with the magazines people might otherwise have bought in the airport. It had a cover star and was very much a consumer-style title."

But when Virgin commissioned them to produce a special magazine for business-class travellers called Carlos, they went down the experimental fanzine route. "It was very lo-fi in production, although it actually ended up feeling far more valuable than standard magazines," Jeremy recalls. "Special paper and various special effects were used in a way that you'd never be able to do on the newsstands."

He believes that "the best magazines are records of their times" and illustrates his point with pages from magazines such as Avant Garde from the 1960s and The Face during its 1980s heyday – magazines which were not only innovators in terms of content and design, but in some cases actually presaged social changes.

Something of a world authority on magazine culture, Jeremy has penned academic tomes such as magCulture and Issues, curated the Colophon 2007 conference for independent magazine publishers in Luxembourg, and writes a regular blog about the magazine industry for his own magculture.com website. Whilst some might see the Internet as a barbarian beating down magazines' doors, as both a blogger and physical magazine designer his perspective is less black-and-white.

"Every time a new form of media comes along some people say it's the end of the old one, but with the exception of the cassette tape that's never really happened," he opines. "I can't imagine a world without magazines, but they'll have to develop. One thing I find very interesting is how you put uniquely-designed content onto the web and make it look special for readers. At the moment most of the web gets pumped into the same templates and looks very formulaic."

"Online magazines like Monkey and Jellyfish are very interactive, but just having flickable PDFs almost insults the reader's intelligence - computers aren't magazines, so why pretend they are? Magazines and newspapers have already learnt a lot from the web - The Guardian's recent redesign was absolutely informed by the way people use information on the Internet."

"You flick through The Guardian and see the headline and the little blurb underneath, and you don't have to read the rest of the story unless you want the detail, which is something the web is very good at doing. There's a new visual language happening and all forms of content are up for grabs now."

NATHAN GALE

Dubbed the world's leading magazine for visual communication, Creative Review analyses current design trends and showcases exceptional work across the board, from big-budget car ads to websites for skateboarders. Of course, with tens of thousands of professional designers scrutinising its pages every month Creative Review needs to be as just as well designed as anything it contains – a task that falls to art director Nathan Gale.

"The magazine's specific purpose is to display work," he's keen to emphasise. "It's not a graphic exercise for me, because it's not about getting my message across. So the design isn't too obtrusive or distracting because we want to be respectful to the work we display."

For Nathan stresses that it's responding to a brief - rather than trying to impress with a flashy typeface - that's the key to good design. "Someone might treat designing a record sleeve as an excuse to flex their graphic muscles, whilst creating a corporate logo normally requires a little more restraint," he says. "But there's still an underlying brief to both of them. So long as that's fulfilled, then that's good design."

"Having said that, a lot of people do buy into the idea of the designer as a brand," he reflects. "There are designers whose work does all look the same, and they can be quite successful because a client knows what they're getting. I try not to impose my personality too much, but you build up a basic toolbox and style. There are certain typefaces and colours that I'll always use, unless I make a conscious decision not to."

Nathan built up his own 'basic toolbox' designing club flyers in Brighton, before a stint of work experience landed him a job at BBC Magazines, working on everything from children's glossies like Girl Talk and Live and Kicking to the corporation's flagship, The Radio Times. "It was really well-designed," he recalls, "but I don't miss the office politics of working in a huge team like that." It's certainly a stark contrast to Creative Review's close-knit office, which he joined in 1998 - where he is the art department.

Despite relatively free rein as a result, Nathan stresses the need for self-imposed parameters to maintain visual consistency. "When I redesigned the magazine two years ago I built myself a set of rules, such as a typeface hierarchy," he reveals. "Because we're a visual magazine, people initially pick it up and flick through the pictures - so we had problems differentiating advertising from editorial."

"We added some extra width, which allowed us to put white spaces in the gutter between pages and give breathing space between advertising and editorial. It also made the magazine square," he continues. "Once we had that strong structure and visual consistency, we could loosen up a bit and play with our own rules."

Creative Review recently launched an online version called E-CR, invaluable for displaying work that otherwise wouldn't fit in the magazine, or moving images that print couldn't do justice. But optimistic as he is about certain aspects of publishing online, Nathan still regards himself as a 'traditional' graphic designer at heart, and any web work has always employed magazine-style flat graphics.

"But if you're a graphic designer, I wouldn't necessarily look to another graphic designer for inspiration," is his parting thought. "Architecture and fashion are the kind of things that inspire original work. If you're looking at another designer's work, it's hard not to try and emulate something they do. I'm lucky, because working at Creative Review means I'm inspired every day."

NB: Nathan Gale was Art Director at Creative Review at time of press.

LINKS

www.ameliasmagazine.com
www.gqmagazine.co.uk
www.jbcp.co.uk
www.magculture.com
www.creativereview.co.uk

Text: Paul Clarke