Editorial Design — Designing Thriving Cities

Finding a visual style for my article

I recently wrote the article “Designing Thriving Cities: The Economic Impact of Effective Urban Design and Planning” for a course at design school in which we create several magazines. We do everything from coming up with topics based on themes to designing the layouts and finding a visual language to create a cohesive reading experience.

You can read my article here: https://medium.com/@katarinablind/designing-thriving-cities-99212c24f218

For my piece, I had to write something about the economic impact of design. It was very natural for me to think about this topic within product design but I actually wanted to challenge myself and learn something new.

I’ve always been fascinated by the economic impact of things around us. One of those things that has been interesting to me for a long time is urban design and planning. It’s such a big topic that influences how we experience the world on a daily basis but it’s also often overlooked if you don’t work in the field.

So I was very excited to dig deeper and with this topic in mind, I started creating a mood board of layout elements, fonts and illustrative elements. Since I knew I’d have quite a lot of text but only 4 A4 pages, I wanted to look for ways that allow a lot of paragraph blocks while adding an interesting highlight or twist to not make it too boring to read.

I was also drawn to more unique display fonts as I tend to just use sans serif for all my designs.

As you might be able to tell, I took inspiration from architectural magazines as well, especially with the images. Since urban design and planning are close to the field of architecture I wanted to create a strong visual theme around that so people would be able to quickly understand the mood of my article.

I first went into Figma to quickly explore many different versions.

After that, I took my selection of cover pages and quickly ideated on the other pages. At that time I hadn’t written my article yet so the designs were purely based on visuals — not taking any article structure into account yet.

Once I had my article draft, I adjusted the initial explorations to fit the structure and flow.

I then took things to InDesign and initially essentially just copied my Figma design. Now here’s a very important tip for anyone doing editorial design (that’s not a pro at it).

Always test print!

As a product designer, I’m used to 16px body text so I was really concerned using 12pt for my layout. But it ended up being to big that after trial and error I ended up with an 8pt body. This also gave my element so much more room to breathe, making the architectural design inspiration a lot more obvious.

While finalizing my designs, I also realized that I should only use sans serif fonts to have that architectural feel. And even though I really wanted to experiment with a new type of font, I decided to fully lean into the visual cohesiveness as that way more important for this project. Besides, I can always just play around with weird fonts in my free time :)

I had a lot of fun diving deeper into editorial design for a few weeks. And more importantly — I actually like InDesign now. Not for everything but it’s actually a really easy and handy tool for finalizing editorial designs. As for the ideation phase — I’ll stick to my trusty old Figma ;)

As always, thanks for reading and have a wonderful day!