Despite social media and online communication being present, printed magazines are still popular. Their format and the experience they provide keep them appealing to the readers. Most readers still cling to that unique feeling that holding a printed magazine in their hands offers.
Magazines are visually pleasing, fun to read, and provide an ideal platform to sell goods and services. You can design a great-looking print or digital magazine by following these steps.
With that in mind, we’ll shed some light on what the best practices for magazine printing are.
1. Plan Your Magazine Printing Project Down to The Last Detail
Everything starts with the planning phase. This is where you determine your goals, how you want your magazine to look and feel, what materials you’re going to use, what are the best custom magazine printing techniques, and so on.
Paying attention to all these details greatly matters. If you decide to hire a magazine printing company to print your magazine, you need to still keep in mind a few design factors. The key essentials to focus on are:
Trim line
Live area
Crop marks
Bleed area
These four elements will make sure that your magazine printing efforts give the desired results.
2. Use Top-Quality Images
Use only high resolution and top-quality images. We live in a visual world of the internet and digital technologies. Modern readers demand the highest standard when consuming any type of content, digital or otherwise.
Your magazine has to be of the highest quality to achieve the desired goal. Therefore, pay attention to the resolution and file format. The standard resolution used for magazine printing is 300 pixels per inch (ppi).
When it comes to formats, Photoshop’s TIFF, JPG, PSD, and PDF are all perfect for images with transparency, layers, and spot colors. Avoid formats like PNG, BMP, and GIF.
3. Right Fonts Help Appeal to Readers
Do some research on how different fonts appeal to different types of readers. Even though this might sound insignificant, trust us when we say it’s important. That aside, you need fonts that are easily embedded in PDF files, to avoid ruining the layout and typography.
There are a couple more things to think about — the font’s legibility and making the font proportional. To improve the font’s appearance, you can use proper kerning.
Different types of articles demand different types of fonts to help you convey your message and represent your ideas in a manner which will appeal to your readers.
4. Right Colors Help You Grab Attention of Your Readers
Using the right color is a vital step in your magazine printing process. It’s essential to know the difference between process colors like CMYK and RGB. CMYK colors are cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. RGB colors are red, green, and blue.
It’s common practice to start with the CMYK color mode and add other colors later. It’s important to know that CMYK doesn’t go well with certain brighter colors.
If you have to combine CMYK with brighter colors, use spot or Pantone colors. They will help you achieve complete color matching and create more vibrant content.
5.Paper quality — Magazines should be on glossy paper for the best image quality. Consult with a professional printer about the right weight and size for your project.
Layout — Because of the nature of magazines, you will need to double check to ensure that your pages will be laid out as expected.
Full-bleed — You can add a bleed to your document so there are no blank edges on your pages. A bleed is similar to a wider margin which is then trimmed in the printing process.
Magazines are entertaining, drive sales, and are fun to peruse both on paper and on screen.