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Volume 7, Issue 3 Outside the Box: Ideas for Improving Your Publication
Outside the Box: Ideas for Improving Your Publication As founder, president and creative director of Silver Spring, Maryland-based AURAS Design, Inc., Robert Sugar has been responsible for the design or redesign of more than 80 publications. He was a member of the faculty at American University for nine years, and has taught design and production to numerous designers, editors and publishers for over 20 years. He continues to lecture on the subject at conferences and publishing houses nationwide. Everyone knows how hard it is to keep your publication on schedule. However, the emphasis on “getting the issue out the door” is perhaps the greatest impediment to improving your publication. Substantive changes will demand extra effort on top of the monthly workload. But in the end, these changes can reduce production pressure and improve the quality of your publication. The five ideas that follow will help you do both. Reconnect with your mission. Your issue structure should be a clear reflection of your mission statement. Even great content and terrific design won’t help a publication that isn’t clear about its scope or its readership. Reflecting a clearly defined mission makes creating a strong template easier—and the better the original template, the better the publication. It’s much easier to create content that meets readers’ expectations when it is divided into very specific, predetermined areas. Good magazines are all about theme and variation. Redesigning your grid, typography, cover and contents page gives you several opportunities to recast the tone of your publication and make the title work harder. Your mission gives everyone involved clear direction for improving your title. Vary your rhythm. Many publications opt for long feature wells full of short articles, but focus groups for most magazines show that readers are actually more attracted to the departments in their favorite titles. Examine your issue map, and create a new rhythm that gives departments and features a more distinctive structure. For example, deciding that your front-of-book will consist of single-page departments and your feature well will have one longer “A” feature and several shorter “B” features makes your publication more exciting for the reader and creates more interesting design opportunities. It will also make the magazine easier to produce because more departments and longer features are easier to assign, edit and archive. Make your calendar “king.” Instead of thinking about your title one issue at a time, think of it as a volume. Varying the issues in size and scope creates more dynamic expectations for the reader, more enticing placement opportunities for advertisers, and longer production lead-time for staff. Creating several “Special Issues” with intriguing annual content and variation on the “regular” structure makes a refreshing change. Giving the reader something to look forward to adds a new dimension of promotional and editorial weight to your title. These four simple words should be explanation enough: Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Embrace reader entry points. Devising global magazine elements that constantly provide invitation to the text can entice your readership into complex content. This process also has the side benefits of improving the navigability of your magazine and making your editorial tone more consistent. Decks, headlines, blurbs, story abstracts, recap sidebars, profiles, and web site referrals are only the most obvious examples. Used and styled consistently, they not only give your reader a richer editorial and graphic experience, but create a stronger visual identity for your magazine. Evaluate your title objectively. So, how does your magazine stack up? At AURAS, we’ve developed a process to evaluate those areas and more. Download AURAS Design's 10-Step Self Critique and Worksheet and use these two documents to take a guided tour through an issue of your magazine and see how well it reflects your mission through your structure, calendar and design. Ultimately, the only way to make your publication better is to create definable areas of improvement and clear direction for exploration. Your readers will appreciate a magazine with a clearer sense of self and a well-defined scope of content. Amazingly enough, your revised publication will also be better designed and easier to produce. A bit of extra work on the yearly volume can result in much less wasted effort on every issue. Resurrecting the “Print Window” command Remember when it was easy to print a directory of files from a disk? That function has disappeared in Mac’s OS X, but fortunately there’s a new, free utility that brings the command back to the Finder. Print Window, by SearchWare Solutions, lets you type Command-P at any time to print what you see, with or without icons, and with or without expanding all subfolders. You’ll find a link to download this utility on the Production Tools page, under Technical Support. Getting around Quark 6.1’s spurious error message Quark 6.2—a free release that will fix several known bugs in 6.1 and will also allow XPress to be activated on home and office machines simultaneously—is scheduled to be released later this summer. Until then, many users might be getting the following font error message: The font "Zapf Dingbats" used in the layout may be corrupt and may be substituted by courier. [108] Quark has released an extension—available here—that disables the warning. Quark says: “The FontAlert Silencer XT prevents the font error warning message while printing and exporting a PDF from a QuarkXPress layout. There may be scenarios where a font is actually corrupt but the FontAlertSilencer XT will prevent the warning message about a corrupt font from appearing. However, there have been reported cases where the font is not actually corrupt but the warning message is displayed. It is up to your discretion to use or not use this XTension.” Whitening teeth without paying your dentist There are hundreds of ways to whiten teeth in Photoshop, but perhaps the simplest is to use the Dodge tool. You’ll find it in the middle of your toolbar, or by simply typing “o” on your keyboard to activate it. First, zoom in on your subject’s teeth and pick a brush size that is smaller than the size of the teeth. Activate the Dodge tool and pick midtones for the range and exposure of 20%. Finally, as if you were using a bottle of Colgate tooth whitening gel, carefully paint on the tooth surfaces. If you overdo it, you can choose Edit > Fade to lessen the effect. Dive into the printer pool Those of you lucky enough to have more than one printer in your office may want to take advantage of an relatively unknown OS X configuration known as printer pool. With it, you can create a group of printers, so that your document automatically prints to the first available printer. The print options are taken from the first printer listed in the pool. Mac OS X Help describes the setup process: 1. Open System Preferences and click Print & Fax. 2. Click Printing, and then the Set Up Printers button. 3. Select the printers in the Printer List that you want to be in the pool. (Select the first printer, then hold down the Command key and click additional printers.) 4. Choose Printers > Pool Printers. 5. Type a name for the printer pool in the Printer Pool Name field. 6. Drag the printers into the order you prefer. When you print, your computer will check the first printer in the list for availability, and then the next, and so on. 7. Click Create. JoAnne Bland: Setting the Pace When Paul Cornetta moved out of his role as production control manager and into sales in January 2003, he left some pretty big shoes behind. “The plant scheduler is one of the most important roles at ULI,” says Operations Vice President Chris Azbill. “This person builds the plan that the plant must execute to satisfy our customers and run the equipment as efficiently as possible.” With on-time performance rates averaging 98% during Cornetta’s tenure, Azbill knew it was essential that the transition to a new scheduler be as seamless as possible. Enter JoAnne Bland, who will celebrate her 28th anniversary with ULI this August. “One of the reasons JoAnne was selected for this role was the vast experience she has at ULI,” Azbill notes, adding that her background in both customer service and prepress was particularly important. “Both of these functions are critical to getting the work into the plant in order to hit the production plan,” he says. Despite the depth and breadth of her experience, however, Bland says she found the learning curve challenging at first. “In scheduling, we process and check all the press and bindery tickets that come from the account managers, establishing a production path for each job to ensure that all the dots are connected,” she explains. “For example, if a job has a 4-page cover, our plan is to have the cover printed and cut just before the folded signatures come off the press, so the job can quickly move directly to the binding equipment.” The Scheduling department, comprising Bland and scheduling assistants Charlie Goode and Melissa Fisher, tracks all job-specific information for each publication, including “show” and “must-deliver” dates, as well as production specifications that will affect delivery, such as signatures with tip-ons, sheeters that need to be cut and folded, or those that are UV-coated and need to cure for a day before being put on the binder. All of those factors are taken into consideration in loading the plant, Bland says, adding that the schedule changes constantly based on new input. “I work very closely with (Client Services Manager) Shannon Marzolf and the account managers to make our clients happy,” she says. Bland says she also relies on some fairly sophisticated tools for tracking production. “We’ve built standards into loading our equipment, so we can get a good projection of how long things will take in the press and bindery. It’s amazing—I can come in on Monday morning and the plant is consistently within two hours of where I expected them to be when I left on Friday evening. Frank Bailey and Ron White, the night-shift managers, are super at providing up-to-the-minute updates on where things are in the plant. And the operators know to get in touch with Scheduling the minute they realize something is not going to happen as scheduled.” Naturally, mastering the scheduling process took time. “For the first six months, I was putting in very long days and getting lots of calls at home,” Bland says. But these days, she’s only working 9-hour days and getting fewer calls, leaving her a bit more time to enjoy her family, her garden and her 5-year-old Golden Retriever. Bland attributes that in part to the success of such initiatives as the addition of actual running times for all jobs on each piece of equipment, as well as time-on and -off equipment fields on the reports. “It’s really helped to keep everyone on track by letting us know whether we’re running ahead of or behind schedule.” But equally important, she says, is the great support she gets from Goode and Fisher. “We’ve worked hard to make the process even smoother.” The One That Got Away: USPS Form 3526 Despite their tight focus on deadlines, many publishers find that there’s one that gets away from them year after year. All Periodicals publishers are required to file USPS Form 3526—the Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation—by October 1 of each year at the original entry post office; deadlines for publishing the complete statement of ownership in your publication are outlined in Section E216.3 of the Domestic Mail Manual. The USPS promises to suspend Periodical mailing privileges if the Statement of Ownership is not filed in a timely manner—and it’s no idle threat. ULI Mail Services Manager Hugh Tolson notes, “In almost 30 years in this business, I saw that for the first time last fall—when we probably had five or more customers who were suspended. And I assume that USPS checks will get even more stringent this year.” For more information, see publication DM-204 from the USPS website. This publication is a step-by-step description of the information needed to apply for periodical status and the requirements for the statement of ownership. An Extraordinary Service Experience: Clay Times Born of Editor Polly Beach’s desire to blend a degree in journalism with a growing love of pottery, Clay Times started as an eight-page newsletter in February 1995. “I’d been teaching pottery workshops and attending pottery fairs when I realized there was only one pottery magazine out there—Ceramics Monthly—and it was not giving me what I wanted,” Beach says. “I wanted a magazine that taught technique. “I woke up one morning and thought to myself, ‘Maybe I should start another pottery magazine,’ ” she recalls. “It was clearly the right thing at the right time—I had a couple hundred people wanting it very quickly.” The magazine’s success in the years since—today it’s a 68-page bimonthly with more than 20,000 readers, distributed at such national book store chains as Barnes & Noble and Borders—belies the challenges of the early days. “It was hard the first few years,” Beach says. “I had three kids ... Three years later, bursting at the seams, Beach moved her staff into an historic building in Waterford, Virginia, where today the eight of them continue to make their mark on the business. “Clay Times has made a change in the ceramics industry,” Beach says. “We were embraced from the very beginning because advertisers and potters were looking for something different.” That “something different” includes regular columns from eight industry leaders. “I read a lot in the field and figured out who was well-respected,” Beach says, “and then asked them to write for us. Each is in charge of one of our departments.” She adds that her columnists also write occasionally for Ceramics Monthly, which she encourages because “it enhances the field. CM has become better because we exist.” Beach notes excitedly that one of Clay Times’ columnists, Bill van Gilder, has recently been asked to do a “how-to” television series on clay work. “I got to help edit the scripts and get to be a guest potter,” she says. “Our publication reaches 20,000, but this program will expose 28 million people to clay works!” ULI Account Executive Paul Cornetta notes that although he’s worked closely with Beach for only about a year and a half, he watched the progress of Clay Times for much of his career with United Litho. “She’s a great success story. I’m really impressed with how far Polly has taken her magazine,” Cornetta says. “One of the first things she and I looked at when I took over her account was her color usage,” he says. “I ran the numbers for her and we determined that by moving to a PDF workflow, she could use four-color throughout (instead of printing half the book black-only) without increasing her print bill.” For her part, Beach is delighted with the change. “The PDF workflow has been a great benefit,” she says, adding that eliminating a proof has generated real savings. “I’m comfortable with it because I know how the process works. I go over and over and over the files before they come to ULI—and then I’m always there when it’s on press.” “Polly is truly someone who knows what she’s looking for where color is concerned,” Cornetta says. “She has very specific expectations—and goes out of her way to get to know the press crews to make sure they know her and know what she wants. Beach agrees: “Whenever there is a concern, I always hear back quickly, and the staff tries very hard to prevent future problems. ... I’ve learned over the years that you have to pick your battles. There are so many things that can—and will—go wrong in this business. You need to accept responsibility for the things you do wrong, but also try to understand when others make mistakes. I believe if I am fair with you, then you will be fair with me.” She adds that she’s a big fan of ULI’s team approach. “It makes it easy when (Account Executive) Tracy Rusher is out of the office—there’s always someone there that I’m comfortable working with.” Rusher notes, “Polly is continually driven to make Clay Times one of the best publications on the market. She’s willing to make any adjustments necessary for her publication to be successful—using updated software, learning new techniques, or just asking for help.” “I’ve really come to rely on Andrew Moore,” Beach says. “Whatever he says, we do it his way. And when he’s not there, Ron Moore has been great. There’s always someone at United Litho to answer questions, and that’s very comforting.” That kind of service translates into real customer loyalty, she says. “When I get calls from another printer, I tell them not to even bother. At United Litho I get great customer service, a good product and a competitive price. “I trust that United Litho will do what it takes to provide us with a quality product and to keep our business. ULI is an extension of our family.”
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