Magazines provide identity

Heerlijk: een boutade pro-printmedium in een nummer van Bruce dat de loftrompet schalt over online media. Moet kunnen! Jeremy Leslie is een magazine designer uit de UK en één van de sprekers op 25 Minutes dat op 26 november door Het Salon wordt georganiseerd.

Plenty has been said and written about magazines being an anachronism in our increasingly digitalised world. And much of what is said is accurate. The environmental, and financial, cost of manufacturing endless copies of printed books and magazines has to be considered. There are areas of publishing traditionally served by print that are better suited to digital forms of distribution. As with any new medium, the internet and associated technologies have plenty to offer, and cannot and should not be ignored.

Equally, however, the arrival of a new medium does not automatically mean the death of the old one. Printed magazines retain unique attributes that make them highly versatile, useful and popular with both publishers and readers.

The most obvious of these is the tangible nature of the printed magazine. It is an object, something that can be touched, flicked through and handed to friends. One of the joys of opening a magazine is the sensory overload of the feel of the paper, the smell of the ink, the glint of light on the pages. The typical reader may not be able to verbalise it, but subconsciously the experience is very different to, and much more pleasing than, that of engaging with the computer or phone. The magazine is also far more flexible – it might be large-format A1, tiny A6, perfect bound or saddle-stitched, glossy or matt, highly finished or very rough.

Magazines also benefit from clear boundaries. The physical item is finite, you can quickly judge how much there is to read, how long it will last, and thus time your engagement with it. Quick bus journey? Enjoy the news items at the front of the issue. Long evening alone? Read the features. This is very different to most digital experiences, where on arrival at a site the reader has no concept of how much content there will be, and is as likely to link to another site as to drill deeper into yours.

Magazines are very functional and simple to use. There is a clear running order to the pages, but that can be easily subverted by flicking back and forth. Want to share a story? Xerox the page, or tear it out. Finished reading? Give it a friend or recycle it.

But the most important advantage of a printed magazine is the role design has in taking words and image and presenting them in a manner appropriate to the message and audience. Editorial design has a sophisticated set of principals that allow content presentation to be finely tuned to a degree simply not yet available in digital media where, for now, technology limits design choices.

Magazines provide identity. They can present your brand precisely as you wish it to be seen, or even help change perceptions of it. They provide the reader with something to present their identity to the world, whether by reading your magazine on a train journey or by placing the publication proudly on their coffee table. They are a public medium while digital remains private.