007: Design Day
You’ll all be familiar with the fact that Wednesdays are officially ‘editorial days’, but Mondays have acquired a special slot for the team now that we’re well underway with the magazine. Mondays are design days — or the days where everyone swears a lot.
I’m not even joking on that last part. I don’t think I’d ever heard Siarlot swear until I saw her working with design software. Designing a product so that it looks damn good is a special thing, but when you fantasise about that end product, you can forget the hours of fiddly hell that go into it.
Our template is beginning to take shape. It’s impressive watching as our head designer is beginning to pull it all together. The trick with such a content heavy magazine is stripping it back but paying close attention to detail. Stand Up must remain consistently on-brand, but also just look like a magazine someone would actually want to read.
Plonking (sorry, lovingly and carefully placing) our articles on the templates inevitably brings up another challenge: word counts. The subeditor, head designer and myself sat down a few weeks back to break down rough word counts for every article. When you’re actually applying the right fonts and images etc. then you start to trim it. From a design perspective, it’s probably easier to have more and cut away content that you don’t need, but from a writing perspective having to snip even thirty words can prove agonising.
On a day when every computer inexplicably crashed multiple times, I’d probably felt more confident about the project than at any stage. The early days of any venture are the easiest; the team or lone dreamer is usually so swept up in their ambitions that the work seems to finish itself. It’s the middle stage that’s the hardest. It’s the fiddly I’m-never-going-to-understand-this-or-do-it-well-enough stage that is absolutely crushing, and this was definitely the moment I was expecting to have some concerns. There isn’t a single doubt in my mind with this team though.
In a lot of ways, the head of design has this part the roughest. Once the template is all done, we can play ourselves (while nagging her for help, of course) and then the pressure on design is distributed a lot more fairly. Yet, the best thing about Stand Up has always been its vision; whether that’s with branding, articles, design or even damn fonts.
On Wednesday we won’t quite be back to our usual editorial routine either. We’ve got some special filming to do which will take up most of the afternoon, so have your fingers crossed for some good weather for us!
#WeStandUp
