QUARTO CREATIVE
Inova Magazine
Inova Health System boasts some of the most advanced health care available in its highly competitive region. To gain an additional edge on its competitors, Inova invested in Inova Magazine, designed to educate referring physicians, lawmakers and media professionals about the medical breakthroughs occurring at the system’s six Northern Virginia hospitals.
The existing Inova Magazine template was defined by its lightness: thin, condensed typography and ample white space, letting the images and graphics do most of the heavy lifting toward reader engagement. It was elegant but lacked authority.
The magazine’s typographic styles benefited from an increased level of contrast, using alternating weights to create organic spaces of saturated black ink that would help to attract reader attention. Judicious spots of bright red completed the hierarchy.
Despite the magazine’s primary purpose as an image-building tool, fostering growth in patient volume would be important in demonstrating ROI to Inova’s stakeholders. Inova Magazine’s existing calls-to-action were bold and branded, but they were uniformly placed at the end of each article, allowing readers to easily bypass them. The redesigned calls-to-action would incorporate more white space for added drama and would fall anywhere within the layout.
In a happy design accident, the word “Inova” was embedded inside the word “Innovations” as a branding element for feature articles.
Feature spreads would contain no fewer than four access points (bold lead-ins, subheads, pullquotes, infographics, image captions, etc.), and preferably many more. Following cues in scale and a restrained color palette, readers were guided through each story at a pace that could be both dramatic and comfortable.
