10 Tips for Designing High-Impact Magazines

 1. Don’t Be Shy With Your Cover Designs

The most aesthetically pleasing magazines always have great covers. There’s no point spending time perfecting the inside pages of your magazine if casual browsers don’t pick up the issue to take a look. An attention-grabbing magazine cover design is vital for selling your magazine to readers and inviting them to delve deeper into the publication.

That being said, your magazine cover design doesn’t need to be brash. A rainbow spectrum of color and an over-packed layout can look dated and cheap; but balanced, strong headers and sub-headings paired with simple, graphic callouts draw attention to cool magazine covers in a subtler way. 

Try sticking to the A B C rule, which is used by the designers of the most creative magazine covers. Stick to one A-heading (the magazine title), one strong (B) sub-heading (pulling out one article to be the main focus), and a larger selection of smaller (C) sub-headings. Almost every magazine cover uses this rule to promote balance in the layout. 

Pair these headings with a strong, simple photograph and areas of white space (where you place no busy text or images), and you have a layout that’s both pleasant to look at and graphically very bold.

Stick with black-and-white photography for a strong look that still looks balanced and stylish. 

Look to slab and display typefaces set in uppercase characters in shades of brilliant white, as in this stylish InDesign magazine template called Arigat, to make text pop against a full-color photo.

Arigat Magazine Cover Design

You can find many InDesign magazine templates that have bold covers like Arigat.

Allowing photos to ‘interact’ with typography is also a great way of making cool magazine covers appear more 3D, and gives the impression that the photo is jumping out at you. Cut the subject of the photo away from the background, and layer them so that parts of the subject are brought in front of text and others behind. Check out this tutorial on how to create a magazine cover in Adobe InDesign and Photoshop that uses this effect:

PRINT DESIGN

Design a Fashion Magazine Cover in Adobe InDesign

Grace Fussell

2. A Single Pop of Color Shouts the Loudest!

Some of the most effective magazine designs use color very sparingly, proving that a simple pop of bold color can be more striking than a palette of rainbow brights. 

Teaming a single strong color with black-and-white photography and monochrome text looks fantastic for men’s magazines and technology titles. Bright typography, banners, and dividers lend a sporty, masculine edge to layouts. It’s super-simple to achieve and is a great way of bringing the whole design of the magazine together (see Tip 9, below, about promoting a style theme in your designs). 

Try an acid yellow or hot orange for an optimistic color pop that looks great on extreme sports titles and travel magazines. Or why not cool it down with a sky blue and golden accent, like on this stylish sports magazine?

Sportwave Magazine Cover Design

A bold red also looks really punchy, and adds a modern touch to old-fashioned black-and-white photography. The Samurai Magazine template shows just how well this magazine cover idea works.

Samurai Magazine Cover Ideas

Samurai is one of the many bold InDesign magazine templates found on Envato Elements.

The key with this look is to pick one strong color and use it sparingly. Don’t apply your color to everything—a touch here and there will go a long way.

3. Spend Time Perfecting Your Contents Page

Once the reader opens up the magazine, the contents page will be their first port of call. The contents page should be functional and allow the reader to find sections and articles easily, but it’s also the perfect place to exercise a bit of stylistic creativity. 

If your magazine has a large amount of content, don’t restrict your contents to one page—branch out into a full two-page spread. This will give you plenty of room to introduce a large ‘Contents’ header (try out a slab serif for high-impact typography) and lots of enticing images. 

All great table of contents magazine spreads will be structured on some sort of grid layout, but it certainly doesn’t need to be restrictive or dull. Take a look at the irregular photo-grid used on this sports magazine’s contents spread—the mish-mash of large and small images looks exciting, not chaotic, and pulled-out taglines add context to each graphic. Large, stylish page numbers set in blue, yellow, and black are instantly clear and make browsing the contents of the magazine a breeze.

Sport Magazine Table of Contents

Or why not base your contents spread on a simpler column grid, as in this design-forward magazine template?

Design Forward Magazine Table of Contetns

Restrict the number of articles you highlight in each row or column of your grid, to give more breathing space to each item and help maximize white space in your layout.

When designing your magazine, focus your energy on making your contents page as well-structured and well-styled as possible. As it's the reference spread for the rest of the publication, you want to make a good impression! You can lift typography styles and colors from the contents spread and use these as a basis for developing a consistent look across the whole magazine. 

Remember that contents pages for magazines are very different to contents pages for books or reports. Magazine contents should be full of enticing images and exciting typography to get the reader in the mood for delving into the rest of the magazine’s content.

4. Illustrated Graphics Make Magazines Unique

Browse any shelf of magazines and you’ll notice that most cool magazine covers use photos as their image medium of choice. However, an illustrative cover can look unique and super-stylish and is a great choice for tech, arts, and design titles. On-trend flat graphics are easy to create and can make your magazine look particularly design-forward. 

Get friendly with Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, or Inkscape to create vector graphics that you can drop into your InDesign magazine templates with ease. 

Vectors are a great way to express more abstract or fantastical concepts, and as a result are the perfect choice for magazines that don’t fall into the usual fashion or lifestyle niches. Take a look at the cover for this design magazine—the abstract graphic catches the eye, and it will be sure to stand out in a sea of photographic covers. 

Unspectub Vector Magazine Cover Ideas

Illustrations, whether vectorized or hand-drawn, also add a lovely unique quality to special issues or collector’s editions.

Using illustrations rather than photos also helps you to promote consistency across your magazine design, helping you to develop a brand look for your publication. This makes it a great choice for magazines that need a strong branded style, such as self-promotional magazines for companies like airlines and retailers.

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5. Give a Digital Look to Print Layouts With Infographics

Titles like National Geographic and Esquire are big fans of using infographics to illustrate articles in a more exciting, tech-forward way. Many magazines are moving away from traditional text-heavy article layouts and taking inspiration from websites and eBooks to create print layouts that appear more interactive and engaging. 

Take a look at this cool infographic spread from a sports magazine template. 

Sports Infographic Magazine Spread Design

The article is divided up into points, with each number assigned a hexagon icon and a corresponding image. Spreading the article across the spine of the spread makes the whole design look more immersive and poster-like. 

Even if you’re formatting a text-heavy article, try experimenting with adding callouts and quotes set in infographic-style shapes and borders. Introduce arrows and dividers to direct the flow of the article and hold the reader’s attention for longer. Use maps and pie charts to demonstrate statistics and geographical locations. Infographics work particularly well for sports, commentary, and finance magazines. 

Infographics don’t need to be tricky to recreate—this tutorial shows you how to create simple infographics, including maps and charts, from scratch, directly in Adobe InDesign:

INFOGRAPHICS

Create a Super Simple Infographic Template in Adobe InDesign

Grace Fussell

6. Go Minimal for Fashion Magazines

If you’re designing a magazine for fashion or lifestyle content, your challenge will lie in making the design look as on-trend and aspirational as possible. A minimal design is a great blank canvas for fashion photos and retail showcases, and it taps into the trend for ultra-simple, stylish print design. It's the best design for magazines about these topics.

Make photos the focus of your layouts, allowing them to take up at least two-thirds of each page. Pair them with a bare white or pastel backdrop and rich black typography, as in this stylish fashion magazine template.

Madelynn Minimal Magazine Cover Idea

Choose Madelynn or another minimal InDesign magazine templates for a restrained look.

Avoid fuss at all costs, to avoid the designs looking cheap, and shy away from making any typography too ‘shouty’. 

Madelynn Minimal Magazine Spread

Experiment with placing images in slightly off-centered positions, to give the layouts a subtly arty look. 

Madelynn Minimal Magazine Spread Design

Look for photos that share a particular color theme or style, and team them together on the page, as in the layout example below. This will help your layouts to feel stylish, beautiful, and calming to look at. 

Madelynn Minimal Magazine Spread

7. Serifs Look Aspirational; Sans Serifs Look Cool

Typography plays a huge part in positioning your magazine in the market and giving it a particular identity and mood. Typeface styles can have particular associations with famous magazines—think of Vogue and think of Didot; think of National Geographic and think of Stone Sans. 

We’ve been conditioned over time to associate particular type styles with specific magazine genres, and you can use this to your advantage when designing your own magazines. 

So say, for example, you’re designing a fashion magazine. If you want to make it look more expensive, luxurious, and aspirational, you can turn to an elegant serif like Didot or Bodoni for Vogue-inspired charm.

Kindle Magazine Template Cover

If you want to make your magazine look cooler and more youthful and trendy, you can take a clean, hip sans serif for a whirl, like MOAM91. 

For sports and tech titles, try out a solid, high-impact sans serif like Sovereign, or why not try a vintage-inspired typeface like New Yorker Type if you’re designing a commentary title (a fitting tribute to the typeface used by The New Yorker).

Photos and color may change with each issue, but typography will remain a constant, so take the time to consider the sort of personality you want your magazine to have, and do your research to find the right typeface that will communicate this. 

Hed Mag Magazine Cover and Layout

The Hed Mag magazine template uses its font to strike a bold tone.