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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Louanne  Hi, and welcome to “Covering the Spread: Inside the Magazine Redesign Process” podcast. We have Carol Moskot and, Carol, I’d like you to introduce yourself to our audience.

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Carol  Thank you for welcoming me. I’m the owner and creative director of Carol Moskot Design and Direction, an editorial/visual branding studio and consultancy in New York. I’ve been designing and redesigning magazines and newspapers in the US and Canada for the last 30 plus years, and before I started my consultancy, I’d always been brought on board to both redesign and lead an art department, and I’ve consulted on large scale redesigns for national newsstand magazines. I’ve launched branded custom editorial publications for large retailers in North America. So I work with — or closely with — corporations, publishers, editors, creatives to, essentially, deliver solutions that build brands and engage audiences across print and mobile and web. I really focus on brand-building and strategy and content development, reposition and redesign.

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Louanne  Let’s talk about what it takes to redesign a magazine. What is a redesign? What is a refresh? There’s so many words we can use as what organizations consider redesigns and why. And what are some common triggers?

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Carol  Well, let’s start with the fact that the two are vastly different. Our design refresh is a way of keeping a magazine’s visual appeal current and engaging, without a more extensive and costly overhaul of a redesign. And it’s kind of a redesign light: more subtle than a redesign, focusing on minor adjustments and updates to visual elements, like your color palette, changes in typefaces or subtle layout tweaks. Some magazines find this a way of incorporating current design trends, and it can be used to refine the magazine’s design, while maintaining the magazine’s core identity and brand recognition. I guess one of the big plusses is: it’s not as time intensive as a redesign. And it can be done more frequently.

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Scott  So what do you find is the payoff for the reader in a refresh?

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Carol  Well, what they don’t realize with a refresh is they are getting the same magazine that they’ve always loved, just with a bit of, maybe, a fresher font. It delivers a feeling of change in a positive direction, and a redesign is something completely different and done for completely different reasons — more strategic reasons.

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Scott  I let out a groan when the word “refresh” came up, because it’s been a bête noire of mine for some time — for precisely some of the reasons that you touched on, Carol. People look at it as a shortcut or as a cheap way of achieving what they think are the same ends as a redesign, despite the fact that it’s a vastly different process and is so rarely undertaken with that understanding.

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Louanne  We’re going to talk about all the different phases of redesign. I think, overall, it’s pretty consistent from designer to designer. But let’s talk about your process. What do you do first when you redesign?

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Carol  Frankly, I spend most of my time talking with the client and discussing the business case for the redesign. That’s really the focal point of a lot of my front-end work. Redesigns are a strategic decision, and they're often triggered by a need to reposition the magazine as a brand (which we'll talk about later, when it comes to Broadview). And redesigns are designed to be impactful content-wise and visually. These are complete overhauls and redesigns are — let’s face it — they’re costly, they’re time-intensive. And it’s really important to remember that a good redesign enhances a magazine’s content and strengthens a good brand. A bad redesign is simply window dressing. Here are some sample issues that often trigger redesigns from the business side: that typical fall off in search numbers — which is indicative of a change in reader interest — and the fall-off can manifest itself in a lack of alignment between the editorial mission and the content of the magazine. I have found several times that the trigger of a redesign is a challenge. There’s an outside challenger to your magazine supremacy. So let’s say you’re a vertical brand. Let’s say you’re a gardening magazine. And there’s a new gardening magazine that is has just appeared on the newsstand. That type of instance has often triggered a redesign.

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Louanne  The first thing that I usually see, especially with an RFP for redesign, is that they’d like it completed in … oh, I don’t know … two months or so. And of course, I laugh. I think six months is probably best for a major redesign. What would you say, when they ask you how long it would take?

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Carol  Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Six months. And the more successful redesigns allow for a lengthier, phased-in period of discussion of how that redesign will unfold. And again, we talk in terms of the business case for the redesign. There are those front-end stakeholder interviews that I conduct with circulation, the advertising department, the editorial department, and the existing art department. I have sit-downs with the retail newsstand, circ director, the head of research and development and even the advertising director. And we talk about what's not working from a business perspective and what, perhaps, has changed in the last couple of years. Has your audience demographic changed its age, male versus female, the location of your readership? Has your reader’s interest changed and the magazine hasn’t? Has your competition changed or is there more competition? Are there changes to pricing around you? Has your subscription model changed and how are your readers getting your magazine? And is there anything we’re missing? What I really appreciate is when a client does the due diligence of conducting a readership survey to figure out where and with whom those shifts are actually taking place.

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Scott  How do you connect the dots for the business leaders at a publication — or whatever kind of business entity it is that’s publishing — between the design that you’re going to produce and all those business challenges that you identified? How do you show them that one will improve the life of the other?

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Carol  As soon as we sit down and we figure out what those problems are, we define those problems. The problem-solving can actually begin. That means redefining the magazine’s editorial goals. I want to focus on the editorial changes that often lead magazine redesigns, because it’s a bit of a domino effect that once you start to look at the magazine as a whole — as the patient — you start to realize that it’s really the core business. It’s the core product that is having an effect on a large part of the business. Look, our business is changing rapidly. The publishing business has been changing rapidly for decades. But, ultimately, we have to produce a product — I hate to say it — a magazine that our readership love and want to possess and read. What I ask the editorial staff to do is define what their mission statement is. Go right back to the beginning and define what the editorial proposition of their magazine is through a mission statement. It’s hard to believe, but many magazines do not have a mission statement, or they haven’t defined their mission statement. I know it’s a very, perhaps, old school thing to think about, but mission statements are simply a logical way of creating a foundation for what you’re providing your readership and, ultimately, the redesign process. If your magazine doesn’t have a mission statement, a simple way to facilitate creation of a mission statement is to ask, “What are the goals and purposes of your magazine? What’s its journalistic voice?”

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Louanne  Sometimes, instead of just saying, “Mission statement,” I’ll say, “Prepare a creative brief,” which is a common word that outlines everything. I talk to all of my clients and encourage them to redefine their editorial in the content. What’s working, what’s not working, what can be added? What can we subtract? I’m personally all about small snippets of information for those that just want to flip through the book, and how we can incorporate that in sections, or in small snippets of information, that are built into each section. So, I encourage everybody to really redefine their editorial right then and there. If you’re going to do a redesign, it’s not just about design; it is about editorial as well.

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Carol  And I think that's the misunderstanding about redesigns: that it’s as simple as going in and changing fonts and just changing the look of the magazine without changing the content.

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Scott  Do you ever find yourself in a position where you’re examining a publication from a distance — as a disinterested third party — where you are finding that the editorial goals that the internal team has defined are really not matching what the brand promise of the magazine is, and it’s necessary to steer them in a new direction?

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Carol  Oh, absolutely. It's amazing how self-reflective editors are, but, sometimes, editors will turn a willful blind eye to the fact that their market is changing — that their readership is changing — and they are still on that same path when they really need to pivot. I’m very plainspoken and open about what I see, and readership surveys also don’t lie. Unveil the bottom line — the truth — to the editors, because it brings upon that “Aha!” moment where we have to — not just change the content — we have to reevaluate who we are as a business.

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Scott  So, we've defined a mission statement or a creative brief or however we're going to term it. What’s next? Where do we lead the editorial team or the advertising team or whoever we’re working with next in this process?

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Carol  What I like to do is to take that mission statement and start to drill down further for the magazine’s brand words — our brand proposition, essentially. These are words that, essentially, reflect the magazine’s brand and what it wants to be for its readership. I start to pull words from the mission statement that are centered on tone and voice, and these are words that not only define who the magazine is in this new realignment, but become the measure of all changes made to the editorial content in the visual design. Once I have a list of brand words, they become the foundation of the brand strategy. I share them with the editors and the visual team, and we literally agree on them. We all say, “Okay, these words that are culled from how we define ourselves in our mission.… These represent us during the editorial and visual redesign process.” I come back to that list of words over and over again from the logo, the cover approach, interior, typography, geography, navigation … what have you. Those words become a measure. If we’re nailing down the content changes and the visual changes, can we still hold those words up while looking at all of those changes? I’m deeply involved in hammering out the editorial structure of the magazine. I am not just brought in to choose fonts and design a logo. I literally sit in on every meeting with the editors as they start to reformulate every single change to every section of the magazine … say, group think exercise. Once that content structure is in place, that’s when I can build out the visual structure of the pages. Until then, I am waiting for the bull’s eye to hit the content — for those editorial changes to be fine-tuned.

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Louanne  I think that’s a lot of where some of these redesigns have fallen apart. I’ll get content and it’s structured in the same way it’s always been structured. Where are the callouts? Where are the visuals? Where is the subhead? And they’re not there. And so I have to go back and say, “Look, remember the visual that we had, we all agreed on, and you all said, ‘Yes, we would do this?’ We’re not doing it.” And so I think that’s a really interesting concept.

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Carol  This process that I do with all my clients came out of being on staff during a redesign, when consultants came into the magazine that I was an associate art director on, and participated in the redesign of the magazine. It was some of the most brilliant creative minds I’ve ever had a chance to sit at a table with, in terms of magazine art direction.

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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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Scott  The other aspect of this, obviously, is the nature of how advertising influences the decisions that are made editorially. Now, it’s been many years since I worked on a newsstand pub that was ad-supported. In those days, it was a constant battle. The two departments just did not get along, primarily because the editorial departments, historically — and I don’t know if this is still true — have a more (in their minds) high-minded approach towards their audience than the advertisers do, which is obviously very transactional. That being said, without the advertising, you don’t have a magazine. So the two sides do need to work together. And I’m curious if that has influenced the nature of things like the editorial voice. Are the user personas that are used as part of any kind of design interaction like this more influenced by what the editorial department has to say or what the advertising department has to say?

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Carol  I worked on the redesign of a city magazine called Toronto Life. Average was publishing 120 plus pages per issue back in the day when I was working on it. And when I came in to redesign it, we were also publishing five massive SIPs and hand guides. It’s a really big business for our advertisers, and the advertising department — rightly so — has a lot of influence, and they were very concerned about the redesign. And I said, “Look, I’m under no illusions that the business of publishing is about making pretty pictures. This is a business, and without dollars, we can’t print a magazine and we certainly can’t circulate it.” I wanted to impart to them the seriousness with which I took their concerns. I think that’s really essential: to tell your client — whether you are a consultant, an in-house art director, or a consulting art director — just how important the business of the magazine is to you and to these changes. My discussion centered around the fact that I was working for both departments. I worked for the editorial department, and I’m also a partner with the advertising department, because without one, you don’t have the other. Without great content, advertising doesn’t exist. It just becomes an entire magazine of ads, and advertisers are excited to get their ads beside great content. There's something we call called positioning. Advertisers often ask, “What’s coming up in your next issue? Can I be closest to a really great feature?” Every single issue, we would sit down with our advertising team, and we would brief them on what was in the magazine so that they could prepare their advertisers, or go out to advertisers and say, “Look, you’ve got a great issue coming up.” During a redesign, I want to make space for those positions.

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Scott  That’s the point you led us back around to: when editorial decisions are made with specific advertisers in mind. “We’re going to develop, as part of this redesign, a new column or a new section that is specifically geared towards getting this kind of advertiser to place ads in our magazine.” Louanne, you must have this among association clients, as well.

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Scott  Have you both experienced the Real Simple conundrum?

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Louanne  Oh, yeah. Yes.

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Carol  I don’t know. Do explain the Real Simple conundrum.

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Scott  Everyone says, "Make our magazine look like Real Simple." And that is the last thing they want their magazine to look like in real life. Everyone loves the idea — the aesthetic idea — of Real Simple, which is encapsulated in the name. It is a pretty simple, basic design. But when you show them that, they’re like, “Well, where’s the design? Where’s the rest of it?”

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Louanne  Right. And they also tend to write too much content … “We agreed to 200 words, not 800 words.”

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Carol  Did you get that in writing, Louanne?

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Louanne  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, I’m just curious, how do you proceed on the next step? Do you just show mood boards? You mentioned before you had key words, which I really thought was interesting because it’s very branding-oriented (I say that in a logo or brand identity). We did a brand for a destination, and we did all of those things that you're talking about. A lot of people don’t think about magazine redesigns as a brand identity and treat it the same way. They tend to separate the two completely. And what you just talked about had the process to get to where you need to go before you even design the logo — or before you even design the magazine — is the same, essentially.

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Carol  Yeah, absolutely. We do this branding exercise, and then I also I bring the competition in. I almost set up a newsstand on the boardroom table, and I said, “This is your competition.” And then I also say, “Now, these magazines are also what your readership has on their coffee table. Given the fact that this is what your readership is going out and seeing on the newsstand, how does your magazine compete? How and what changes do we need to make?” We spend time, looking through those other magazines — through the competition. I want to hear the good and the bad. I’m interested in hearing about the competition that they say to me, “This is the publication that really does a great job, and these are the reasons why we admire it and why they do a great job.” We talk about the content and the visuals and how they come together to speak to their readership. I’m also really interested in why they think other magazines aren’t working and why they think their magazine isn’t working.

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Louanne  It’s scary how much negative feedback I’ve gotten on certain things that I just love, and they're like, “No, no, not at all. No.” “Okay, we’ll try something else.” I’ll literally show them: I will go through magazines and create a mood board of, maybe, all pull quotes, and just get their feedback on what they like and don’t like and why. And let them know: Quotes are important. We need to put them into your column or your department and whatnot. I think it’s really helpful because when you do present the concepts, you definitely are already avoiding things that you’re going to get a big stop for.

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Carol  Yeah, absolutely.

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Scott  It’s an interesting design point that’s, maybe, a little tangential or a sidebar, but how you deal with negative feedback as you’re presenting a redesign ideas? How do you manage that process?

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Louanne  I mean it’s a constructive…

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Scott  Carol’s never received negative feedback.

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Louanne  Yeah. They love everything we do. They can’t choose. They love all three. You have to take it in stride and figure out, if they don’t like it, why. That’s it. If they just say, “Well, it’s because my ex-wife’s car was red…” You know? Then, okay, all right, fine. Really? Are we going there? But, usually, they have a valid reason. And I listen and figure out a way to make it work. That doesn’t always work, but you find a way to do what you have to do to make everybody come to the same agreement. There’s always ways you can change things — always. It’s not always perfect, but this is what design is.

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Carol  Yeah, absolutely. And you have to have an open mind. The editors also ask for my feedback on their — not on their writing, on their content — but we talk about how headlines should be structured, how they should be written to look really great on a page. We also we talk about whether headlines should feature every single word with a cap versus upper and lower case, and just a cap at the beginning of the sentence. Simple things like that make a huge difference.

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Louanne  They have to figure out how long their headlines are going to be in order for us to figure out how that style is going to be, because we can’t have it in 48 point if they're going to have ten words in a headline. It won’t work.

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Carol  I mean, how much time have you spent working on that folio? Should it have the name of the magazine, or should it be the URL of the magazine plus the month? Should it be the number rather than the month spelled out and the year? Should it be just the number? Year? Just days…

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Louanne  It’s crazy how different every client is, too. And it’s confusing for me, sometimes, because some clients want every word capitalized and other clients want only certain words capitalized.

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Carol  I love that. I love that: every client being so incredibly different. It’s really influenced by where they grew up and what magazines they worked for, and the traditions that they’ve brought up in their education as editors. It says a lot about where they’ve come from. I think we all bring our histories with us as art directors and designers when we do redesign. I’m fascinated, and I find it intriguing and helpful, and it becomes a discussion when editors put forth, “Well, we do things … I like it this way.” I’m so interested to find out why. They will often say, “Well, why do you feel that it should be that way?” We find that in-between way of doing it or they’ve we’ve managed to sell the other on what way makes sense for — not us — but for the magazine.

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Louanne  Scott and I both have designed a number of association magazines, and people tend to stay in associations for a very long time. We have editors who’ve been there for 20 years, so sometimes it’s very difficult for them to change. We get to come to the table, having multiple redesigns under our belts with multiple companies, and we get to bring all that information to them, which makes us so valuable, because we get to tell them, “Well, this association did this, and this association did this.” Some of these editors in the association — they’ve just done their job and they haven’t really thought about that kind of stuff. They’re so ingrained in the content, which — a lot of it — tends to be technical. They’re not a visual-type person. They really rely heavily on us to put that together. And I think that’s great.

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Scott  One of the major trigger points in my career for redesigns has been the introduction of a new voice at an organization. This also feeds into getting designs approved by all the various stakeholders: making sure that the important people — or the people who feel that they’re important in the process — get their fingerprints noticed on whatever the piece is. And I’m curious, for both of you, because we’ve all done, I’m sure, redesigns that we then hand off — or were meant to be handed off — to an internal staff to then create. That includes an internal design staff. How do you get their voices heard? This is someone who feels a great sense of ownership for this property, and you’re coming in as a consultant, telling them, basically, how they’re going to be doing their jobs in the future. A lot of people have a hard time with that. And again, that is completely understandable. So what’s the strategy for bringing them on board with the new product?

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Carol  It’s so important to build a partnership with that art director who you will be passing the redesign to. That partnership doesn’t start when you finish your project. That partnership starts well before. During the presentation of the stages of that redesign, I will often share some of it with the art director before I present to the editors. I will let them know where I’m going with the presentation. But during the presentation, I really listen to what that art director has to say because they are, literally, the boots on the ground. They are working with their editors every single day to produce the magazine, and I’m not. I am producing a packaged redesign and there are realities — qualities — that get checked at the door when the art director sees some of the approaches that I’m presenting. A good art director will ask excellent questions about how the approaches will be used realistically during the production of the magazine and after the initial presentation to the editorial staff. I will start to work more closely with that art director and bring them in for consultations on a lot of the potential issues they’ve brought up so that we can problem-solve right away, and I can tweak those issues so that once the redesign is actually handed off, there aren’t issues. Part of my consultancy is to spend two to three weeks — sometimes an entire first issue — working in the art department with that art director to make sure that redesign becomes a true handoff, where they are learning the design that I created. “You have to understand how those fonts work when you layout or design that headline, how that body copy is supposed to be set, when that copy is flowed, how that pacing is really supposed to feel when you structure that article.” It's great to have the person who is working on it every day be there with you to execute it together. I’ve been very lucky to be able to do that for several magazines.

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Scott  Something I wish more people understood about this process — and why consultants like us come at the price that we do — is we have to be able to predict every use case that is going to present itself over the lifetime of this design. Usually, we’re only granted three or four issues to use as reference points. Particularly, if you are blessed with being able to reimagine the editorial direction that the magazine is going in, there are going to be use cases that have simply not occurred in the magazine’s past — where the staff is going to have to make a judgment call. We need to have predicted that and reduced, as much as possible, the leeway that they have to make those judgment calls — not because they’re not skilled to do it, but because it likely will suit the content rather than the purpose of the redesign. It will suit a single use case, and not the overall trajectory that the magazine is supposed to be following.

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Louanne  Right. It’s hard. It really is. And you’re right: We only get a window. We usually will have an art direction oversight for the first three issues, at least. I’ll ask them to send me PDFs, and I can mark them up, because that’s pretty much the best way we can do that, given the limited budget and scope. They’ll ask a lot of questions, and I want to be here to answer those.

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Scott  There are so many people who are asked to design magazines without a firm grounding in it as a design discipline, which is unique. It is not the same as doing almost any other kind of design. Among the things that the current staff don’t like about the magazine, what is the worst part of your job? What is the one piece of content that is always a headache? What’s the thing that you’re always rushing to finish against the deadline? And let’s address that now. That’s part of the redesign process: to make their lives easier.

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Louanne  In our world — in the associations — we have some magazines that can be more technically-based. I did a redesign for a magazine called Coatings, and it was all about paint and coatings. It was very scientific and very technical, but yet it still needed a fresh design. They had enough money to use art on their opening spreads. But we couldn’t go wild and crazy, and there’s only so much photography of paint you’re going to find — and coatings — in stock photography. So the rest of it might have been supplied. You can only imagine … guys spraying something. They’re not very good. And you have to figure out a way to always design with the worst possible photo in mind. It’s the most backwards way of doing things. They don’t teach us that in school. “Here. Here’s the worst possible photo you can have. Make it look good.”

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Carol  I may be able to top that.

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Scott  We’re going to end things there, but we have much more on this topic to cover. Join us back here for part two of our discussion with Carol Moskot as she walks us through the process she followed when redesigning the award winning Broadview Magazine. It’s an incredible story and you won’t want to miss it. Coming soon!