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  Welcome listeners! Today we’re talking about the unique challenges and rewards of designing for a regional magazine and how that differs from working in trade publishing.

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Scott And we’re joined with designer Kelly Martin. Kelly, can you introduce yourself to our listeners, please?

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Kelly  Sure. Happy to be here, guys. Appreciate it yet. Taking the time to talk with me a little bit. I am a graphic designer. I started my career in journalism design. And really, I stuck in that niche for a long time, working in both trade pubs and in regional publications. And the last couple years I’ve transitioned more into freelance creative design, working on variety of different things — website design, product design, branding … kind of everything under the sun that you do, when you’re a freelancer.

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Scott And you and Louanne have a common institution in your past. Is that correct?

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Kelly  We do. We do. We’re both proud and graduates of Ohio University. I’m actually wearing a Bobcats t-shirt today. We have a few years apart there, but it’s some pretty common experiences, I think, in going to a place that really focused strongly on visual design, when maybe a lot of places weren’t really doing that with the focus that they had, especially in journalism and things like that.

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Louanne  So I went there when the Macintosh was first starting to make its way into graphic design. This was back in the day when we had those tiny little Macs and we had to do the MacShuffle. I majored in Fine Arts with a focus-… well, fine arts graphic design. So my degree’s in fine art graphic design. And that’s a little bit different from your path, Kelly. You went into, what? The school of journalism?

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Kelly  Yeah, so I started in fine arts. I thought I was gonna be a photographer. That was kind of always a big passion of mine, growing up. I had a dark room in my basement when I was a kid. We had a great photo program at my high school, so I really learned how to print. And got really into photography — started off in fine arts, and then crossed paths with a lot of people in the photojournalism program, and that was in the School of Visual Communications. So I moved into that, realized I was not as good of a photographer as I thought I was, but had gotten lucky enough to cross paths, again, with a lot of the more graphic design side of the visual communications school. And they really focused on journalism design. And so that was my introduction to newspaper and magazines.

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Scott How do you feel that your grounding in photography has influenced you as a designer?

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Louanne  I mean, my father was a photographer and a journalist, so I picked up his camera and started doing that. And I took a lot of photography in school. And for a while I, too, thought maybe I wanted to be a photographer, but I wanted to be a studio photographer, not a journalist/photographer. And I took an enormous amount of studio classes. I actually went to New York City after college, and I ended up getting a job as a graphic designer ‘cause that’s really where my strength was, but I had the opportunity to work as an assistant on a freelance job once. And I realized you really have to start very, very low on the totem pole when you’re working in the photography business. I was literally just getting coffee for the photo shoot. I was doing nothing else. And it was pretty humiliating. I think that setting up photo shoots and orchestrating them and learning all about lighting and how everything should be set up and applying that to some of my graphic design made me a much better magazine designer because I can then art direct a photo shoot and know exactly what that photographer is doing and be able to stand there at the shoot and not tell them what to do because that really wasn’t my job anymore, but I knew enough to know where things should be, how it should be lit, and I think it just, overall, gave me an edge as a designer who worked on photoshoots.

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Kelly  For me, it really helped me to kind of think about how the photography and design work together. I learned a lot in shooting photos on my own and then shooting photos in school that when I got to where I started designing pages, if I didn’t like the photos I had, I would go shoot my own. And my first job in journalism was at Scripps-Howard News Service in DC. And we had a small budget, small department for visuals and the managing director of visuals there was a former photographer. And he pushed all of us. He would just throw cameras at us and be like, “Go shoot this. Let’s make an illustration.” We’d take some photos. We’d make a studio in an extra office and shoot a bunch of photos and then chop them up, use them in illustrations. And it really helped me to think about the design as a whole, as opposed to being like, “Oh, this is the photo side. This is the design side.” And then for me, when I started art directing, it helped me immensely in setting up photo shoots. You know, I think one of the things was that I knew that I was not as good a photographer as people I was hiring. So I would give them direction, and then I got out of the way. And I would generally speak up when I thought something was not going in the right direction or things like that, but I really learned to respect the craft of it. And I think for me, it helped me forge a lot of really, really strong relationships with photographers. Over the years, that trust lets you get just better and better imagery. When they know that you trust them, photographers will try some stuff that maybe they wouldn’t normally. And usually, those happy accidents are where the most fun stuff happens. I think, by getting out of the way, a lot of times, I probably helped us have better photographs.

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Louanne  Absolutely.

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Scott So maybe we should define our terms for people. We’re talking about regional magazines. And what do we believe are the characteristics that distinguish a regional magazine from other niche publications — from a trade publication or from a special interest magazine that’s nationally focused?

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Kelly  The key to regional magazines is that you’re aiming at a smaller localized community. That community can be a gigantic city and it can still be a regional magazine. Living in DC and working at Bethesda Magazine, which is the regional publication I worked for, it was Bethesda Magazine, but they really focused on Montgomery County. Montgomery County had over a million people. So it was a massive audience, potentially. But it was still very much a community focus and really looked at things through the smaller lens of a local community while still trying to see how national issues and national events would impact that. So the key was always kind of keeping in front of mind that your focus was that community first and that you were really trying to look at how these things, how these issues, how these events would impact it.

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Scott One of the things that I would always try to keep in mind when designing for a regional audience is that our magazine, in my case, was free. So right off the bat, it’s fighting a losing battle against publications that people are going up to newsstands or subscribing for, because people keep a transactional mindset when they’re deciding what to read. I’ve paid $5.95 for this magazine and I’ve paid nothing for this magazine: Which one am I going to go to first? That’s not a hard contest. And a lot of regional publishers, somehow, don’t think that they’re in competition with national magazines, even though that’s the other stuff that their readers are gravitating towards.

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Kelly  I think one thing that we tried to do at Bethesda a lot was to focus on how national events or national issues would impact this community directly. And, being a suburb of DC, there was a lot of layers to that. I mean, things that affected federal employees could have a huge effect on our readers. National politics would often have a big effect on the area, but you still had to frame it through the lens of: How does it affect this community? That was always one of the big strengths of our editorial team, especially our editors, was keeping that focus tight, while still being able to show these are national events that are impacting us, but here’s how. And I think that that was always the challenge in DC, and I think in a lot of larger metro areas, it’s probably the case as well, to keep that focus and keep it on usable information for your community, while still being able to show, “Here’s how this relates to the bigger picture.”

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Scott So what was your experience in art directing the magazine in terms of integrating the community into the content?

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Kelly  To me, it really started with hiring local artists, as much as possible. We were hiring photographers, and we were hiring illustrators. I wanted to hire people who had a tie to the community. People have a greater sense of ownership when it’s in their backyard, when they’re creating art, when they’re doing things that are gonna be displayed in their neighborhood and where they live. But, also, they have a depth of knowledge of the area that you can’t really teach. And if I was hiring somebody to make a summer vacation guide or winter gift guide — these kind of big seasonal packages. A lot of times we’d hire illustrators to do the opening art form. And you hire a local artist and they’ll weave in a lot of little things: little imagery, little things that would mean nothing to somebody outside of this community, but in this area really resonates. And when you’re talking about competing on newsstands and things like that, — that was a new stand publication — those little hooks are a big deal. You know, those are things that really draw somebody in when they’re trying to decide whether to buy your $5.95 publication or the one next to it. Those little touches make a big difference.

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Scott And what about involving the magazine in the community? Did you feel like the name Bethesda magazine was recognized when you went out to source material?

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Kelly  When we were dealing with local politics, Bethesda magazine had a pretty good following and it had an outsized presence for quite a while in Montgomery County politics. When I was working there, Bethesda really expanded from just covering Bethesda to covering all of Montgomery County. So that was incredibly helpful there: that we had dipped our toe in that pool for a while. And it got into where we had some credibility in the community as being a serious news outlet, while also still covering a lot of the other things that regional publications would cover, as far as food and style. And a lot of that came because we hired editors and writers who had ties to the local community. They maybe had been people who graduated from a college in the area or worked for another regional publication, Northern Virginia magazine or Washingtonian magazine … People who had a familiarity with the area already. And then, a lot of the people who worked there lived in Montgomery County, as well.

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Louanne  Well, did the topic ever come up about changing the name from Bethesda magazine to something else that encompassed all of Montgomery County? Because I don’t believe there is any other regional magazine of that size in Montgomery County. I know what Frederick County has one, but not Montgomery County.

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Kelly  Part of the reason I was hired was that they were rebranding the company. A part of that rebrand was changing the name of the overall company. It would be changed from Bethesda to MoCo 360. I wasn’t wild about that name, I have to be honest, as part of the rebranding team. It had a little bit of too much Microsoft 360 sound to it. But the approach was really good and we talked a lot about changing the name of the magazine, but there was just way too much concern about us losing advertisers. The advertisers that we had — especially our most dedicated advertisers — were based out of Bethesda. There was a big concern that somebody who was advertising a car dealership in Bethesda wasn’t going to really care about reaching people in Poolesville or Clarksburg or some of the places that were much further out. So there was a lot of discussion about it and we ended up settling on having the overall company being MoCo 360 and keeping Bethesda as Bethesda magazine.

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Scott People from the Washington, DC, area know that the big dog among regional publications in that area is Washingtonian magazine and has been for a long time. Did you feel as though Washingtonian was —not to put too fine a point on it — eating your lunch, in terms of advertising or creative resources?

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Kelly  Yeah, and a big part of why Bethesda magazine was started, as Louanne pointed out, is there was a news desert in Montgomery County and the Washingtonian covered bits of Montgomery County. They would cover Silver Spring/Bethesda area — basically, the areas right outside of DC, but not very much depth. And so it was kind of seen as being an opportunity to be able to start a publication and be able to corral a lot of advertising that way. But the Washingtonian was always a really big draw for a lot of our advertisers, especially in the more affluent areas of Montgomery County — those are usually all the ones that butt up against DC. So there was definitely a lot of competition between the two.

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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 In terms of the challenges that are consistent between associations and regional publications, can we talk a little bit about budget and the tricks that both types of publications use to get around really stringent budget requirements?

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Kelly  Knowing that I was going to have a set budget for the year that was going to be high enough for me to be able to build a magazine with, but not something where I could hire any photographer or any illustrator under the sun. So really having to look at: Where were the biggest impact pieces each year? But also, I would look at ways that: Is there a cover where I could design something that would, essentially, be no photography required — a type-only cover, or something where I’m just doing a big texture … something that was a relatively simple approach that would still cover the concept really well — make a really, really nice cover — but maybe, I could save some money on that one to put towards a bigger cover or bigger package later in the year. And to me, that always really relied on a lot of planning with the editors — especially with the executive editor and with the managing editors — to look at, “Okay, over the course of the year, what are gonna be our biggest photo packages? What’s gonna be our biggest creative impact as far as a package in the spring, in the winter, and try to budget accordingly?” And to me, that was always a challenge, but I always really like that part of it, because kind of going back to what I was saying earlier about just taking the camera and going out and shooting, I loved to try and find opportunities for myself and for the rest of the creative staff to create something. If somebody thought they could do an illustration, let’s do an illustration. Let’s try. Let’s see what you can do, and a lot of times, you would find some hidden gems in there. You’d find somebody on your staff who had some skills that maybe they didn’t even realize. As much as the budget challenges are maddening on a lot of levels, they’re the reality of it. Each publication only is bringing in so much revenue. You have to pay staff, you have to do all those things. You’re only going to command the percentage that works for the company as far as your budget. So for me, it was always trying to find those opportunities to do something really fun and do some stuff in-house and learn a lot of skills along the way. Over the years, I shot photos, I made illustrations, I did backgrounds — illustrations in oil pastel and then scanned those in and used that as a texture. You could just do a lot of things that were really fun, but it was definitely like some guerilla graphics.

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Louanne  Any graphic designer who works on a publication can relate to that unless you have a huge budget and work on a very national publication, which has always been my dream, but it’s never happened. Stock photos and stock illustrations — we try not to use them just as is. Oftentimes, we’ll download five of them and create a custom illustration, using textures and images and combining photographs with illustration and doing a photo collage of some kind. And that gives our client the opportunity to save a lot of money and us to be really creative. Scott, your background’s in illustration. Do you incorporate some of your work in?

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Scott All the time, all the time. And I can’t imagine being a designer without some kind of pictorial background. That’s why I asked about photography with you two, earlier. It gives you a sense of space on the page. So many designers think of it as a flat surface and only as a flat surface. And it has depth.

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Louanne  One of the challenges I have with that, though, is clients. God bless them. You love them. And we have to have them. And you present these ideas — these photo illustrations — to them, these creative concepts. And somewhere along the line, whether it be them, or the higher ups, they don’t like photo collages. And they just want a photograph. That’s when the roadblocks, for me, start kicking in — when the concept goes down and you end up relying on something very basic because somebody doesn’t have the same vision, even though we try to sell that vision.

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Scott This is funny because I was just having this conversation with someone yesterday about how you can’t let taste be the driver of artistic decisions, especially in publishing. I had someone tell me once that their executive director didn’t like yellow and we couldn’t use yellow in anything, which is obviously nonsense. It’s as perverse as disliking sunlight or water or plants or something, and yet the staff just accepted it as a fait accompli, without taking the next step and saying, “We need to understand what this bias is based on because it’s clearly not based on a dislike of the color yellow. That’s not possible.” This is the skill that designers are working at: to tease out the real story behind that and address it in a way that satisfies whatever their bias is but doesn’t limit you, artistically.

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Kelly  When I first started at Bethesda, they didn’t really use a lot of illustration and there was an institutional bias against using illustration. “If we’re a community publication, we really need to focus on the people in the communities who we need to be taking photos of: people.” It took me a while to figure out that it wasn’t that they didn’t like illustration. It was really that they were concerned that illustration wasn’t telling the story of the people in the community. When there was a story that was people-driven, we would really try and lead with photography. And maybe I could supplement it with illustration, but when there was something that didn’t have a singular or a group of people as the focus, that was where I would look to try and push illustration as a tool because it made more sense then to the editors. It made more sense to our publisher. One of the things that I always tried to look at was, “Am I doing these things because I want to do them or am I doing it because it helps solve the problem?” I had an early art director who used to always say, “We’re not making portfolio pieces here. We’re not building portfolios for each other. What we’re doing is trying to tell a story visually.” Number one: It makes the problem-solving easier; but two: You gain a lot of respect from the editorial staff. They know that you’re coming into this, trying to make the best storytelling piece that you can, and that you’re not coming into it, trying to say, “There’s this really cool illustrator I want to use.” And I think when you build that rapport, you build that trust. It makes it a lot easier when you get a little further down the road to be able to push something that’s maybe way out of their comfort zone.

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Scott Just playing devil’s advocate, I can respect, up to a point, a regional publication’s philosophy of eschewing illustrations because photography represents their subject matter more authentically. That was the philosophy that we had when I was working at a regional publication in Boston: to try as much as possible to represent the community photographically just to prove our bona fides. One of our secret weapons was we could work with some of the top photographers in the area because we were getting subjects who they wouldn’t be able to do shoots with, otherwise. There were a number of celebrities who would grace the cover of the magazine. And we’d get photographers who we could never afford under normal circumstances working at cost, because they wanted to do a shoot with Jay Leno or Nomar Garciaparra or Peter Wolf or whoever it was.

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Kelly  I would look at ways to: Could we open this story with an illustration and then have a really nice environmental portrait of the person inside? We’re still being able to showcase the people, we’re still being able to speak to that community directly, but we’re giving a much more interesting end to this story. If I had an editor who had said that we weren’t allowed to use the color yellow, the argument I would have tried to make at some point is that, when we do use yellow, it’s going to have more impact than any use of yellow has ever had. Save that bullet in the gun for when you have something really really big.

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Louanne  When you hired an illustrator — for both of you —did you try to find a style and keep that general style or did you change the style based on whatever your preference was for the magazine?

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Kelly  I would have a general aesthetic that I would be looking for throughout the magazine. You know, I would generally go to the same illustrators for certain types of content. But at the same time, the whole point of using illustration was to give a fresh look. So I tried to use as many different illustrators as I could. I generally would look at the topic and then try and pick an artist who I thought could cover the feel we wanted, whether it was fun and playful or serious or technical. I always had a pretty big stable of illustrators that I just kept in my back pocket, trying to find, “Is there something that we can work on together and does our budget work for you?”

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Louanne  Our listeners are going to ask, and I see this question pop up a lot: Where do you source this information? Where do you source illustrators?

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Kelly  It’s like an ongoing treasure hunt, right? A lot of times, looking through other publications that I like, I see people that I like, and I would literally rip out a page, keep it, and I had a folder that just had tons of illustrators in it that I really liked. I find so many illustrators from Instagram. As much as I hate the algorithm-driven world that we’re in right now, Instagram is great when you start following similar illustrators because they start suggesting other illustrators, where you see the illustration community is really tight. So you follow one person and then I start seeing who likes them and who comments on their illustrations and I would start following some of them. You can see a huge depth of content from them but you can also see what they really like. To me, that was always something that was key. I always like to give illustrators assignments that they like. Same way with photographers, you know — all of this applies of photographers, as well. But trying to find people things that I know they’re going to connect to, you know you’re going to get something that’s more fun. You might be able to get a little break on the budget. And you know, the collaboration part of it is going to be that much more fun because they’re really into it.

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Louanne  If you’re looking for somebody and you don’t have a built catalog like you just said, I like the iSpot. You can not only buy stock Photos that you have to buy the rights to, but it has so many different styles for illustrators and you can work with them to hire somebody custom. Are there any other online resources?

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Scott Honestly, I work with agencies a lot for illustration. More than photography. I have an international network of photographers that I go to on an individual basis. But as far as illustrators go, it’s just so much simpler. Their catalogs online are so good. Now that being said, there’s more commonality in illustration styles than I feel like there used to be. I feel like there are maybe two dozen styles that illustrators have tended to gravitate towards, but there’s less risk-taking (perhaps, is one way of positioning it), than I feel like I used to see. And you can understand that.

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Kelly  Yeah, I mean, I think they’ve gotten a lot of feedback over the years on what appeals most to clients. There’s a lot of illustrators on all those places, right? And at a certain point, it’s like: Is it better if you stand out or is it better if you have a comfortable style? And I hate to say the word “comfortable,” because it makes it sound like they’re not taking risks. But in some cases, I think you’re right, Scott. I’ve noticed that I see a lot less hand-created art. But I remember cut paper illustration was a big thing. And there was a lot of really, really cool illustrators who worked in that style. I don’t feel like I see very much of that anymore. And I think that a lot of it is probably because the labor takes a lot more time to make those jobs worthwhile. You have to be able to get a higher rate. And then a lot of cases, those rates aren’t there.

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Scott That’s for sure.

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Louanne  Let’s talk about journalism. So one of the reasons why I think both of us went to OU (I know I can speak to that), is that as a back-up for me, if graphic design just wasn’t going to pan out for me, I thought maybe I’d go into journalism. It was something my father did and I wasn’t terrible at it. And I had an interest in it. I was the editor of my high school paper. And I never actually ended up taking more than one class because design ended up working out for me, but they have an outstanding journalism program at Ohio University. So having that interest, though, and having that background, and just being a good steward of writing in general, I think, really helps you as a designer. You’ve really got to know what your hierarchy of words are and what your words are saying. Could you rewrite a headline for somebody who’s a client who just, you know, that’s not their thing, because not everybody is an editor? As a designer, you work on other things that aren’t even magazine-oriented and you may end up, working on inserts or something and you need a catchy headline. So for me, journalism really helped me as a designer. I think it made me a better designer.

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Kelly  Yeah, I had 100% agree. I mean, journalism probably shaped my approach to design more than anything else. And number one, there was in the program that when I was at OU, I did a lot of informational graphics as well as doing traditional magazine/newspaper layout and design stuff. And the graphics were often technical, really data heavy. You had to understand the content. And it was going to be really tough to make a series of graphics on something if you didn’t understand the content really well, as well as understanding what you were trying to do with the story, but just a base knowledge of what it is that you’re building was key. And when I started working in design, I felt like that journalism background really helped me in that I could have conversations with the writers — not necessarily on the level they were at with the content, but on a much deeper level than somebody who was just stepping in, trying to make pretty pictures. It helped me be able to communicate with the writers, which almost always results in better overall designs, a better story … just a better experience for readers in general.

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Louanne  How many times have you gotten a story from a writer and it didn’t have any call-outs? It didn’t have any subheads? In order to make the visuals work, you had to read the story and extrapolate information from that article and pull it out and suggest a sidebar or a call-out, or even go back and say, “Hey, can I get more information on such and such? Because this is like a great segment.” And I think that’s, again, what makes a better designer instead of just taking what you have in there and calling it a day. Because you can make a difference.

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Scott I always request the sources. I want to know who they interviewed. I want to know where they read their information. I want to get all the links to it. Because I’m going to go back and — not check their work, obviously — but I’m going to supplement the story they’re telling with additional details. One of my pet peeves in publishing in general is people who A) don’t put in photo captions; or B) put in photo captions that tell you what is in the photo. If you’re not giving people additional information in that spot, you’re missing a huge portion of your audience. There’s people who are, literally, only going to read that photo caption on that page and then move on to something else. If you’re not giving them something, they’re not coming back.

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Kelly  No, and I would say, along those same lines, that we would do a lot of stories at different publications that I’ve worked at that would be data-driven — would have a lot of graphics and stuff, a lot of data in them. And one of the first things I would always ask the writers is, “What was the source of all this data? Where did you pull this stuff from?” Because a lot of times, it would be publicly available data. I’d go and look it up. Our team would go and look it up and try and find: Are there other stories we can be telling from the data in here that aren’t just repeating exactly what we’re already saying in the story? If you’re loading a story up with numbers and with data, it’s really hard to consume. It’s hard for people to visualize that. It requires a different kind of thinking than reading does. So we would find as many ways as possible to go through and look at the content that we can pull out — make graphics out of this, make call-outs, do some big number kind of treatments, do some things that you can get some of this data in there and get it in a way that’s going to be more bite-sized chunks, but also just separate from the content.

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Louanne  Well, I think a lot of people, before they even read the story, they might skim and they’ll read those call-outs and that data and the sidebar and the little snippets. And that’s what I tell everybody when I do a redesign of a magazine is that when we’re looking at a feature or even a department, you have to assume people are going to skim before they actually read. And so you need to give them a reason to stop on this page. And that information alone is their reason to stop on this page. And yes, it could also be illustration or photography, but I think the content plays just as much of a role in this. With that being said, though, I’ve questioned about giving people a reason to stop. One of the things that I always tell my clients when I’m redesigning is that you always must end the magazine, the very last page on something compelling and something different, something out of there. It could be an illustration, it could be a profile … just something different. Did you guys, did you have that in regional magazines?

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Scott Yeah, we did. We had a page where readers would send in photos of themselves holding up the cover of the magazine in some exotic location. And we’d occasionally get celebrities who would hold it up, too.

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Louanne  Oh, that’s a great idea.

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Kelly  The last page in every issue at Bethesda, we did “What I’ve Learned.” And it was somebody local, usually somebody you had — I don’t want to say local celebrity, but something along those lines. Sometimes it would be celebrities from the area, other times it would be somebody who owned a huge business in the area, or something like that. What’s the best decision you made? What’s the worst decision you made? You know, what did you learn from them? But that was one that I was able to convince the editors we’re going to illustrate that every time. And we hired the same illustrator for that one every time. We wanted to make this fun. We wanted to make this kind of a memorable last piece.

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Louanne  I think a lot of people like myself will flip through the magazine, and the first thing we’ll do is we’ll go to the back. The natural way of flipping is backwards. And on REALTOR® magazine, it was horror stories from REALTORs who were showing homes. It wasn’t actually completely horror stories. It was also some just interesting stories. There was an illustrator. I would just give him a story and say, go to town. And he would submit sketches and they were all awesome.

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Scott Talking of starting from the back, I saw something just the other day. I can’t remember what magazine it was. It was something that had been redesigned recently where they put the table of contents on the inside back cover because they’re acknowledging that are people who are just going to open it from the back. And so they’re saying, “Okay, you started here. Here’s what’s in the rest of the issue.”

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Kelly  Is that the only place they put it or do they have a table of contents in front?

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Scott No, they did not have a TOC in the front of the book.

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Louanne  I know somebody who they don’t have anything special on their last page, but they start the story and go backwards. So instead of ending the story there … so it’s maybe like a three-page department and they’ll start the three-page department there. And then it goes backwards. So you have to read it backwards.

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Scott Oh, I’ve seen that before, yeah.

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Kelly  I would love to hear the discussion that had to take place between the editors and everybody to convince somebody to do that. Because there’s no way that was a one-time discussion. That had to take a while to build up. Because I love the idea of it, but that’s pretty punk rock.

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Louanne  For me, it’s crazy. Yeah. Kelly, what takeaways do you have from working on a regional publication versus a trade publication?

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Kelly  I think they’re both super interesting. The one thing I think that they both have in common is that on different levels, you can assume a much greater depth of knowledge on topics than you would necessarily going into a general publication — a general news publication. You know, when you’re working in the trades, you know that your audience is well-versed in that industry. You don’t have to explain a lot of the base level stuff. Number one: It helps cut out a lot of kind of early information, but the other thing that it really does is it lets you dive really deep into complex topics that you might have to spend a whole 500 or 1,000 words, setting up the topic, before you can even go into it, where you can just kind of dive right in. And I think that with regionals, it’s similar. You have people who are tied to an area. They have a very specific knowledge of an area that you can exploit. And you can even come back to topics and revisit them, explore them in more depth, and not have to worry that you’re losing your audience. This is an audience that I feel like is going to be really into these kind of topics.

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Louanne  Yeah, I think overall, the design for these regional publications really connects to community together. I know that if I were to visit a new community or consider moving to a different community, one of the first things that I think I would be looking for is a magazine about that community. It just really speaks to the community as a whole.

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Scott There’s more that they have in common than separates them to the extent that you are talking to a very specific audience, an audience that other members of that audience understand in a way that people outside either the association or outside that region cannot appreciate. And that that is the secret weapon of magazines like that is the more — and I hate to keep using this word — but the more authentic you can be in the nature of the content and how you’re representing it, the more loyalty you will instill in that audience.

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Kelly  Definitely agree with that.

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Scott And before we go, we want to let you people know that if you want to see Kelly’s work, you can find it at kmartindesign.com. All right, well thank you so much for joining us today. We had a great time, and please feel free to join us again sometime.

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Kelly  I would love to. Really appreciate you both for having me on, and let’s do this again.

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Louanne  Thank you, Kelly.

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