I decided that the best way to understand the workings of periodicals was to look at the process from the inside, so since May, I have been working as a layout designer for a business magazine Agroinvestor. This is now my main activity, and the blog posts will focus on it. I will show you how the processes of publishing a magazine are arranged, what is essential in the layout and preparation of the publication for printing, and how to optimise your work from issue to issue.

How I got into publishing

I want to give some confidence to newcomers who wish to work on a periodical. At the time of my job search, I had no experience in this field. Orders for multi-page layouts were, of course, but still, periodicals work differently. After two months of searching, I was interviewed by the chief editor, who gave me a test assignment. To my surprise, even just getting a test assignment proved problematic if you didn’t have the necessary experience. So anything is possible, as long as you keep at it :-)

Test Assignment

The essence of the test assignment is to repeat the current layout. The chief editor sent me a text to be layout and some magazine pages:

Agroinvestor, May 2021

Before starting work, I “deconstructed” the layout and identified the grid, fonts, styles, and bad points I could already correct.

A five-column grid in the body of the article, with the speaker box at the bottom of the page taking on a life of its own and defying any logic:

I recognised the fonts in Adobe Acrobat. I was lucky because they sent me a pdf file, but they could have also sent me a jpeg. This is how I identified all the fonts in the document:

The styles include a three-line drop cap, colour palette, font size and styles for body text, headings, headers, text within illustrations with tables, and line widths in the design.

The unfortunate points caught my eye immediately — the lack of optical alignment and block alignment in general, the holes within the text canvas and, of course, the dangling prepositions. The thinned lowercase also caught my eye, but there’s nothing I can do about them (yet) — they’re design elements:

Highlighted some points

In this post, I won’t describe the layout of the test job itself. I’ll talk about the layout and the nuances at another time. Below are a couple of spreadsheets of my layout:

I sent the final work to the chief editor and told him about the design improvements. A couple of days later, I received an invitation :-)

What else do you need to know about working on a periodical

In addition to being able to layout InDesign, you need to understand the principles of offset printing, prepare images for offset printing, and upload a file for the print shop to meet their requirements. I’ll go on to cover all of this in detail over time.