Louanne  Welcome to “Covering the Spread, Magazine Design for the Next Age,” a monthly discussion of all things related to our favorite medium, magazines.

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Scott  Whether you're a seasoned designer, an aspiring creative, an editor or publisher, or just someone who appreciates the art of storytelling through visuals, this is the place for you.

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Louanne  I'm your host, Louanne Welgoss from LTD Creative, a graphic design firm located in Frederick, Maryland, and I've been working on publications for thirty-two years. You can see our work at LTDCreative.com.

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Scott  And I'm Scott Oldham from Quarto Creative, who's been making magazines for twenty-five years. You can see my work at QuartoCreative.com. And on this podcast, we'll chat with industry experts, designers, editors, and production pros to uncover the secrets of all things magazine.

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Louanne  It's time to turn the page and what you thought you knew and reimagine the future of publishing.

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Scott  It's April 7th. It is a beautiful spring day in Chicago, which means it's snowing.

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Louanne Oh, well, it's a rainy, cloudy day in Maryland.

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Scott  Louanne, tell me about your beginning in this industry as a magazine designer.

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Louanne So I actually wanted to be in magazine design when I was in high school. And the reason why is because my father was a journalist early on in his career. And I wanted to kind of emulate what he did. In high school, I ended up working on the high school newspaper. And what I really enjoyed about it was doing the layout. So my father taught me basic layout and I thought, “Wow, this thing's pretty cool. How can I make a career out of this?” So he actually taught me things like: how to read in a Z pattern across the page, and about tombstoning headlines and basic newspaper stuff. And when I was in high school, I declared I wanted to be the art director of Elle magazine. And for no particular reason.

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Scott  Yeah, that's a really specific goal to set for yourself.

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Louanne I know, right?

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Scott  You gotta wait for somebody to die, basically, before you get that job.

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Louanne Right. And looking back, I realized that Elle magazine was all ads, so I'm not sure where I was coming from. But it just seemed like that was the thing to do. That's kind of where it all started. And then I realized in high school there was a career path that I could take called graphic design. And it didn't require me to know how to draw (‘cause I'm not an illustrator). And I thought, “Wow, this is it. This is my path to being the art director of Elle magazine.” So that's where it started. What about you?

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Scott  It's funny: I wonder if you surveyed publication designers, broadly speaking, how many of them had that same experience of working on their high school newspaper or some kind of school paper, because that's exactly what happened to me.

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Louanne Oh yeah?

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Scott  I was appointed to be the news editor of the school paper, which meant I was just doing the front page. And it's exactly what you said: I got hooked on doing the paste up. In those days, we were cutting it up and doing paste up with wax and Formaline and all that stuff. And I really can remember getting into having everything line up perfectly — how big an achievement I felt that was, just knowing how the stories were being written and edited because I was doing that part of the work as well. Ironically though, I did not pursue that at that time because my real passion was illustration. And that's what I went to school for.

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Louanne Completely the opposite of me.

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Scott  Yeah, there you go. I majored in illustration and I was an illustrator — a professional illustrator — for many years. As I went along, I found that I could get a lot more business if I could combine the illustration with graphic design. And it didn't take too many jobs like that before I felt I really did not know what I was doing as far as typography was concerned — and I probably ought to. And it was probably something that was going to hold me back. So at that point, I decided to go back to school. I went to grad school and majored in graphic design (communication design, they called it, at the school I went to). And that kind of led me into publications.

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Louanne Oh, okay. Interesting. So you're kind of like me, in a way, with illustration being your strong point. My father was also a good photographer, as any journalist should be (they oftentimes have to take their own photos). And so I actually have very, very close to a minor in photography and I wanted to combine my studio photography skills. I didn't want to do journalism; I wanted to do studio photography. I think that's ultimately what makes me a better art director now because I didn't get a job doing photography, despite the fact that I actually tried, in New York City. Between the two — like you — I think that makes us better magazine designers.

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Scott  Oh, 100%.

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Louanne Yeah, we know the other side of things.

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Scott  Well, there are skills that you build in those other disciplines that absolutely apply to graphic design. In fact, I don't know how people do it without that kind of background — a background in pictorial composition.

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Louanne Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that. You know, I wonder —I don't even know what they're teaching today — but we’ll probably bring that up on another podcast. I think that would be really interesting to talk about.

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Scott  What was your school experience like for learning graphic design?

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Louanne I went to Ohio University and it was a great place to learn graphic design. And when I went there in the late 80s, this was back when computers were just starting to come out — Macintosh, specifically. They were creeping in. At our high school, we had our resident genius on the newspaper who decided in 1984 to bring the Macintosh into our newspaper. I think this was like the same time the Mac actually became a thing. We were printing all of our stuff out, typing all of our articles into whatever those first programs were.

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Scott  PageMaker?

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Louanne No, before PageMaker.

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Scott  Oh, wow.

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Louanne Yeah, and then printing them out on a matrix printer and cutting them out and pasting them in. I mean, I was nerding out on all that stuff, but in college, they had computers at OU and I didn't see any other college that actually had those. So that's why I chose that. We didn't actually learn magazine design, but we did so much in typography and so much in thought process and how to put things on a page and come up with the concepts. We didn't learn how to use a computer. We didn't learn that kind of stuff. We learned how to think through things and how to organize your thoughts and the content on a page. And I think that ultimately was what drove me into being a magazine designer was because I liked that — how to organize content on a page is my favorite thing to do. What about you?

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Scott  Well, there were two halves to it, as I mentioned before, because my undergraduate training in illustration, which I got at the Rhode Island School of Design, was based in visual problem solving. Which is, as you point out, a skill that translates no matter what kind of tool you're using. It serves you whether you're using a paintbrush or whether you're using Photoshop.

When I went back to grad school — I went to Pratt in New York — it was a little bit more technical to the extent that I was using the actual tools that I ultimately would be using as a professional, which was not necessarily the case when I was an undergraduate and certainly wouldn't have been the case had I been studying graphic design at that time. But it was the same kind of thing: It doesn't really matter whether you're using QuarkXPress or pasting a layout by hand. What matters is how you're directing the viewer through this content. And again, that applies to anything. It wasn't really until later that I discovered magazines as a medium to express that. My focus at that time was books — I was very, very heavily into books and book design.

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Louanne When you first started, did you even know that there was such a thing as a trade magazine?

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Scott  I don't know. I really don't know.

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Louanne I just thought there were consumer magazines. What you saw on the newsstand was it. It wasn't until I was in Cleveland, working — I had a job at British Petroleum, working at their in-house department. Then the department ended up shutting down when they had made some cuts in the company. And I was like, “How can I get into magazines?” We had two publishing companies in Cleveland. One was Penton Publishing Company and the other one was called Advanced Star Communications and they had published all sorts of magazines. I couldn't believe it. And I was like, “Oh my god! My dream can come true. I can work for Elle Magazine.”

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Scott  Do you remember what any of those titles were?

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Louanne Yeah, I ended up getting a job at Advanced Star Communications and I worked on a magazine called Hotel and Motel Management and it was actually a tabloid magazine. I was the graphic designer. I loved every minute of it and it was just such a wonderful experience and it took all of that stuff that my dad taught me about laying out, and all that newspaper stuff that I learned, and let me use it to my best potential on this news magazine. And it was a monthly magazine.

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After that, I ended up getting another job in the company — a promotion, overseeing a group of designers and art directing two magazines. This was in the medical group. So that medical group had two magazines. One was called Physicians Management. And it was directed towards physicians on how to manage the practice. The other one was called Relax. And that was the greatest magazine ever with zero budget. It was pretty amazing — Relax magazine. It was targeted towards the physicians who went to conferences to get their CME credits. This magazine would target all the different cities of that for that particular month — when they had conferences — so they could actually take their family vacation there as well. So it was a travel magazine designed for physicians and tied in with the locations of all the CME conferences they went to. It was pretty cool.

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Scott  What a great idea. There are so many. There's hundreds of those.

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Louanne I know. It's too bad that both of the magazines that were in that industry — they both tanked. I just think that there's too many other magazines out there that will supply the same kind of content. They could look anywhere and we were at the at the cusp of internet at the time. I don't think they could get the advertisers. It was kind of a shame. I mean, in a way, I'd kind of love to revisit this now and see if I could redo it. I really think that I could get destinations to advertise.

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Scott  But that was your first job in magazines?

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Louanne So that was my second one. The first one was in hotel management and that was my second one. And I ultimately ended up leaving the company. It was not doing well and I needed to get out before I was forced out because of layoffs and I went back to working in-house corporate. But after that, I ended up moving to Washington, D.C., and got a job at yet another publishing company, called Hanley Wood. But I didn't work on magazines, which, ultimately, I really wanted to. But I got to work on another side of magazines, and that's doing all the sales promotion. So that was a whole different world.

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Ultimately, all of this experience made me a very well-rounded magazine designer because I knew both sides of the industry and I knew all the people in production. I knew how to lay out a magazine. I knew all of the inner workings. And then I also knew how to handle sales promotion. That was a really great experience and brought me to where I am now. What was your first publication job?

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Scott  Okay, get comfortable. This is, unfortunately, a long story. I'm gonna try to shorthand it as much as possible. So, when I was in grad school, I had an internship at Graphis Magazine. I was brought on to help out the art director, and I spent about a week doing that. Literally, my job was to retilt images in Photoshop so that they were perfectly right-angled. That was it. So there really wasn't anything for me to do and it took about a week for the art director to realize that he didn't need my help (and really didn't want my help). So he kicked me upstairs — literally, not figuratively — to the editorial department, where the managing editor was a one-man band at the time, and really way overworked. A very, very nice, capable guy, but just had way too much on his plate. So he handed me a couple of news sections of the magazine. In the back, at that time, they had design-related events around the country or exhibitions around the country, and then international news about design. Which was basically just repurposing the press releases that came into the magazine. And so he gave those to me both to write and … I may have done the layout. I don't remember, but I definitely got to write them. And that's what got me hooked on an aspect of magazine design that I didn't realize I loved until later, which is writing headlines. I love writing headlines. And I got to write my own headlines for all those little news items that I was writing for the back of the book. There would be like, ten per page. That was a lot of fun.

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But my first job job came about quite by accident. I'd been hooked up with a staffing agency in New York City that got me a couple of freelance gigs while I was in school. And then for personal reasons, I moved up to Boston after I graduated. So I figured, “Well, that's the end of that. I'm not going to hear from them anymore.” And I was very surprised a couple months later when they did ring me up and said that they had a client in Boston who was looking for a magazine designer. They saw that I had this Graphis thing on my resume and thought I would be good for that. So, not having a full-time gig at that point, I went in and … this experience could be an entire series of podcasts. This magazine was called The Improper Bostonian. It's not around anymore, unfortunately, but it had a good run. It was in publication for at least twenty-five or thirty years. And at that time, it was still run by the guy who founded it. And he had this idea that he wanted all of his writers and editors to come from newspapers — specifically the Boston Globe, if he could get them, — and for his designers to come from New York City. The art director he employed was working — at the same time — at Time Out New York, and they had modeled a lot of the magazine after Time Out, at least in the listings section. He wanted that kind of aesthetic and he thought he would get that if he hired somebody from New York. Seeing that I had come through this staffing agency in New York, he assumed that's where I was, not realizing that I'd come up to Boston. So I met him, and we seemed to hit it off, and I thought it went pretty well. And then I went back and met the art director, and we seemed to get along.

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And then a couple days later, on a Saturday morning, I was reading the newspaper (the Boston Globe), and there was this item in the business section — very short but very noticeable — that said that the previous Friday, the day before, this publisher had had a big meeting with his staff and in kind of a very dramatic moment, had quit and left the magazine that he founded. And it left it very, very nebulous in the article, whether that magazine was going to be a going concern. So again, I thought, “Well, that's the end of that.” And so I was very surprised when a week or two later, the art director called me up and had me in for a second interview. He basically said, “When can you start?” And I said, ‘How about now?” That was it. Then he left a couple months later because of a change in management that he wasn't too happy with (the smartest thing he could have done at the time). Having no other options, they kicked me into his job. That was my first art direction job in magazines. It was a bi-weekly magazine, that was lifestyle. It was news and events in and around Boston. It was absolutely the best education I possibly could have had at that point in my career. At any point in anyone's career, I fully recommend working, if you can, for a general interest magazine like that, because you get to see every topic and every side of that topic.

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Disclaimer The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any organization, employer, or company they may be affiliated with. Covering the spread is intended for informational and educational purposes only. While we explore topics such as design trends, industry practices, and future predictions, The content shared should not be interpreted as professional advice or a definitive guide. Listeners are encouraged to conduct their own research Before making decisions related to magazine design, publishing, or business strategy. We may reference or discuss third-party content, technologies, or companies. These mentions are for context and commentary purposes and do not imply endorsement or affiliation unless explicitly stated. Additionally, given the ever-evolving nature of media and technology, some discussions may become outdated. We strive for accuracy, but we make no representations or warranties about the completeness or reliability of any information shared. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the spread.

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Louanne So, just curious: What program did you use back then? Was it PageMaker or were you in Quark at that time?

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Scott  No, that was QuarkXPress by that time.

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Louanne I started in PageMaker. I'm one of those rare people that was PageMaker 1.0. There was probably a program before that I used — I can't remember what it was. PageMaker to Quark to InDesign, and, I swear to God, if they make another change, I'm out. I don't know how much more I could take.

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Scott  Well, do you remember the changeover between PageMaker and Quark?

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Louanne I do. One of my first jobs was back in Cleveland, working for British Petroleum and they were all using PageMaker, and at that time, I was using both because I was previously in New York City, working at Coach Leatherware at their headquarters and their marketing department. New York was all about Quark. There was no PageMaker in New York. And I went back to Cleveland after that, and they were all using PageMaker. I'm like, “You guys are so far behind the times.” I told them when I got the job, “I'm going to bring you all into Quark. You guys need to see the future.” And I did. I taught them — I showed them all what it was and how much better it was. I taught the whole staff the basics. We kicked PageMaker to the curb in that job. I can't even remember what year — 2008, 2009, maybe — we had to kick Quark to the curb and bring in InDesign. And I had to learn that on demand. I had a client who said, “Sure, you can do this, but you have to do it in InDesign.” Like, “Oh, okay.”

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Scott   I felt like InDesign was set up basically to make that transition easier for most people. At least I didn't find it that difficult.

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Louanne No, it was surprisingly very easy. It was just all the things that you've learned — your shortcuts and everything — were all different. So you had to relearn a lot of those hand gestures that you were so familiar with.

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Scott  Oh, absolutely. And to this day, there are features that I miss from QuarkXPress that they have yet to integrate — and probably never will integrate — into InDesign.

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Louanne Right, right, me too. So, how many magazines do you think you've worked on over your time then?

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Scott  You mean titles or individual issues?

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Louanne Titles, I guess.

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Scott  Titles … I'm gonna guess it's around fifty. Somewhere in that neighborhood.

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Louanne That's a lot more than me, but you also worked at a company that you didn't own, but that handled a lot of different titles. It was a much bigger company than me as well. So, how many of those do you think you redesigned?

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Scott  Oh, that I know because I actually had to count it for my last redesign (because I wrote about that for the project). I've done thirty in my career.

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Louanne Oh, okay, that's a lot. You know, I actually don't know. I think I've done about ten to fifteen of them, and I probably should sit down and count, but I actually have to say this. I'm going to toot my own horn here for a minute: That every single redesign I've touched, I've won an award for.

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Scott  Oh, no, I can't say that. That's really impressive. Have you ever done this? Have you ever put a little trap door in your redesign that you know that designer is not going to be able to handle, so they'll have to come back to you for more business?

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Louanne Yes. That is so funny that you call it that. Yeah, all the time. We try it every single time. And yes, we have gotten calls to come back. I've actually received one of them back, but the others, I just didn't have the budget. I had somebody who had worked in-house for decades and they just weren't going to do anything about that. But yeah, we always try that. It's funny. Didn't like to make that public, but I think everybody says that, I guess.

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Scott  So much for that. You can't do that anymore.

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Louanne Are magazines still a vital medium? Magazines in general — the print version of it — I think they matter so much because they offer something digital just can't replicate. It's the power of curated storytelling and an intentional design. Every spread, every typeface, every image — it's all placed there with a purpose. And you're not scrolling endlessly or getting bombarded with pop-ups and ads, and you're sitting down with a magazine and you can take it anywhere with you. Granted, it requires more than just your phone, but it’s something that's been crafted to guide you through a story and you can actually just look at it as a spread and just read the call outs, if that's what you wanted. Or just read the headline or just look at the photos all at one place. And you don't have to scroll to get to those things. And I mean, personally, I think that creates a deeper connection with the reader. It just feels more thoughtful and more immersive.

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Scott  Well, I think that is always going to be the advantage that magazines have over their web counterparts: the ability to appeal to multiple reading styles. On the web, everything is designed for short attention spans. And there's nothing wrong with that, per se. It's the nature of the beast, unfortunately. But in a magazine, you have to design for that. You have to account for that. But you also account for people who are in it for a long-form content experience. Or for people who are somewhere in the middle, where they will invest the time in a longer article, but need to be drawn in first. Versus the people who are only gonna skim through it and just read the captions or the calls-to-action, or all the bright, shiny things that you see in a well-designed magazine.

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Louanne Yeah, and I think a web design … sometimes something will pop up — an ad on the side — and you're like, “Oh, shoes for 50% off!” And off you go into that rabbit hole you have no desire to go down at that particular point.

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Scott  I can say this is someone who's had to design both web ads and print ads — or the same content for the web ad that goes into the print ad. I don't know if this is true of other designers who didn't come to print first and then the web, but the real estate you get with a print ad is so much more freeing as a designer than what you have to work with for a web ad. Yeah, I know you can add motion and sequential content in a web ad that you can't do in a print ad. But in terms of typography, in terms of drama, in terms of design, there's no competition.

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Louanne Right. But I'm not sure that everybody sees it that way, which isn't weird. We're all about that, but not everybody else understands it from that perspective.

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Scott  No, and in trade magazines, for sure. And that's...

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Louanne Oh, absolutely.

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Scott  Yeah, that's a real drawback, unfortunately, for that particular niche, which is comprised of a thousand different niches. Their advertisers just don't have the wherewithal to do the same kinds of high-end, good-looking ads that you see in newsstand magazines, obviously.

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Louanne Right, I've seen some, some really bad ads.

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Scott  Yeah, we both worked with them. We both have to live with them.

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Louanne I've even offered to redesign — for free — some of the really bad ads. But yeah, that's called “You love your job way too much.” So I'm curious, as we wrap this up, what do you think is going to happen? We're going to talk about the future of print publications in our podcast. And we're going to talk a lot about what's happening now versus the future. But where do you think the future is going to go?

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I think we may see fewer magazines in general. But I think the ones that are going to survive and thrive are the ones that actually lean into real quality. I'm talking about niche publications. You see them already at some of the newsstands. If you go to a newsstand like Barnes and Noble, for instance, you're not going to see as many magazines that you're used to. What you see is, if you pick up a magazine, you're like, “Oh, this is this month's Food and Wine,” but — and I'm probably using that as a wrong example — you end up picking up a special edition of Food and Wine. And so it's their strong niche: one-time collectible pieces. That's what, I think, you're going to end up seeing out there so that you've got those to collect and those to keep. But you get the everyday content on the website.

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Scott  Exactly, exactly. I don't have the exact figure. I probably should because I'm supposed to be an expert at this. But the volume of titles — published titles — in magazines have actually gone up in recent years, at the time when everyone assumes that magazines are a dying industry or a dying medium, precisely because of what you say. Yes, the general interest magazines — the Time magazines, the Newsweeks — they're still out there. But they understand that they're not gonna break any stories anymore. At least they're not gonna do it in the magazine. The magazine is going to be there for the deep dive — for the analysis of news that everyone is getting through other sources. And as far as the other magazines go, yes, absolutely: The more specialized it can be, the greater a sense of loyalty that they know they can build up among a niche audience.

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Louanne Absolutely. You know, it's funny: When I went to Barnes and Noble, those general interest magazines are fewer and far between, and yes, they are very specific. But it's the really specific — the fishing, the cars, all of those magazines … there's fly fishing (I don't even know how many different kinds of fishing there are), but there was a magazine for every kind of fishing out there. And a magazine for every kind of car aficionado out there. And there was a lot of them, but there wasn't a lot of the other types of magazines. So those types of things are gonna stay.

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Louanne Thank you for listening to our first podcast. And we look forward to doing a lot more. This is going to be a monthly podcast with some special guests. And we're going to talk about everything from the evolution of magazine design to the production process to working with brands and advertisers and the future of magazine and the list goes on. Stay tuned for more episodes with myself and Scott Oldham.

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Scott  And what's your name again?

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Louanne I am Louanne Welgoss.