Printing Options

So, now onto Part II of the response.

"I'm an editor of the literary magazine at Aspen High School in Colorado. Our litmag team has a theme (Spectrum), but we are short on ideas for layout and overall design. I'm also interested in cheaper methods of printing, having gone far over budget on our last two editions. Any advice would be greatly appreciated." -Lars

To discuss the second part of this comment. Printing, I think, is the biggest headache in publishing. In the short time that I have been involved with the printing part of the magazine I have seen a lot of stuff. We have gone from having the mag cover and binding pulled out from under us, to having the printer that we were working with being bought out.
In last year's magazine ! (Yep that's it "!"), we stumbled onto Duotone. This is a photoshop tool that can make a grayscale image appear to have a single color in it. You convert the image to grayscale and select a pantone color. It is hard to explain with out looking at an image or Photoshop. By doing this you give the impression of color in grayscale images, without the cost of 4-color. In your layout software, you can also create swatches using the pantone color that you used for the duotone image. This means that you are only going to be printing in black and one color. Pantone inks are the same, no matter what printer you go to. Pantone colors take the place of one of the inks that are part of CMYK. So you are only printing in two colors.

Binding is also something that can save you money. Look at several printers in your area. Talk to them and explain what you are doing. Perfect binding is one expensive option. You can go with a stapled binding as well. It really depends on what you want. Ask the printers for examples of their printing and their binding.

The last option, that I have to be honest I have little knowledge of, is online printing. Do a Google search and go from there.

I hope that this post, and the previous post, help to answer your questions Lars.

Developing the Theme

Thank you to Lars for the post. Let's look at the first part here.

"I'm an editor of the literary magazine at Aspen High School in Colorado. Our lit mag team has a theme (Spectrum), but we are short on ideas for layout and overall design. I'm also interested in cheaper methods of printing, having gone far over budget on our last two editions. Any advice would be greatly appreciated."
-Lars

Once the idea for a theme is there, you hit a wall. It is one of the hardest parts of the magazine. You have an idea and everywhere to go with it. It can be daunting. Our staff has actually had to go back to scratch after our first idea really wouldn't pan out. So we are at the same point that Spectrum is.

At this point you need to look at what possibilities your theme can offer you. It doesn't need to be an exhaustive list, but don't stop at the first idea. This is not the same list that I talked about before.
I am an art teacher. I drive my students crazy with thumbnail sketches. For those non-artists out there, these are very basic sketches that help to organize the artist's thoughts as they develop an idea. I tell my students all of the time that their first idea is very rarely going to be the best.
Start your list of ideas. The list can be doodles, words, what ever helps to get the ideas out on paper. Then review the list and see what ideas have the most potential. Our staff is actually doing some research to help develop an idea that we are pursuing. They are bringing their ideas back to the group at our next meeting. We will go from there.
Don't be afraid to scrap an idea that you have worked on for a while. Sometimes things get published that should have been scrapped before publishing. It's a hard thing to realize and harder thing to actually do something about.

Once you have an inkling about where to go start looking at how the layout can be tied into the theme. The ideas that you just came up with should be a guide for the design. Can your theme be reflected in a folio? Should it be part of the folio or should the folio be simple? What colors are you going to use (Spectrum really opens the color realm, but that may not be how you want to go with this.)? Sections or no sections?

Above are the things to keep in mind as you design. If you're still nervous about the idea it can't hurt to start developing things in the computer. You may stumble onto something as you begin creating.