Let us know what you think in the comments below!

To start the new year off right and celebrate the Year of the Dragon, we are having a flaming hot sale.  We are offering 25% off the production cost of all full-priced publications.

It’s a great time to refresh your business collateral and order new brochures, flyers, catalogs, portfolios and more.

From now through February 14, 2012 all existing and new full-priced publications are on sale.

So enjoy the sale and we wish you a prosperous 2012!

Grand Prize Winner: Sean McCloskey
Sean’s portfolio showcases his 15 years of concert photography experience and trust us – the images do not disappoint. Sting, Sheryl Crow, Prince and David Bowie all grace the pages of this 83-page montage of music heavyweights on stage and in their element.

Click here to view and purchase Sean’s winning portfolio, or read more about Sean and his photography on his website.

Runner-up Winner: Cemal Ekin
Cemal’s submission shows off the architectural beauty of the famed Hagia Sophia museum in Istanbul. Views from all angles make this structure shine in a most deserving light.

Click here to view and purchase Cemal’s amazing work, or visit his MagCloud profile and follow him on Twitter.

Runner-up Winner: Jeremiah Johnson
Jeremiah draws a close relationship between photography, design and architecture in his portfolio. His extensive experience in the field is chronicled in his 46-page submission. We encourage you to take a look.

Click here to view and purchase Jeremiah’s submission, or see more of his work on his website.

We want to thank each of these great creative professionals as well as everyone who submitted an entry to our Portfolio Contest and voted. A very special thanks to our wonderful sponsors: Wacom, Pantone and MyFonts. Our winners got some truly amazing prizes.

Your brand collateral is the most important opportunity to talk about your product or service. But getting your target audience to read your brochure, or catalog cover-to-cover isn’t always easy.

That’s why so many businesses have found that branded magazines are a unique way to pique audiences interest with relevant content and information, while reinforcing their brand message. It keeps them top of mind in a format that gets to their customers or target audience more frequently—be it annually, quarterly or monthly. What’s better—it’s in a form-factor that is both familiar and comfortable for the reader.

Many businesses have found that they can better engage with potential customers and increase brand loyalty by publishing a magazine of their own. According to a study conducted by the Association of Publishing Agencies (APA Advantage Study, 2007) on branded magazines (or as they call them, “customer magazines,”) – customers spend 25 minutes on average with such a publication, compared with a TV ad (30 seconds) and an internet ad (0.5 seconds). That’s 25 minutes immersed with a brand.  And while in-house magazines were once considered glorified advertorials, today the use of subtle branding and genuine editorial content helps many successful businesses tactfully promote themselves. *Want to read more about the study? You can download the executive summary as a PDF here.

How does it work? Well, by presenting your business in a more editorial format you can:

• develop prospective customers and foster increased loyalty
• establish your organization or company as current on issues and trends
• position yourself as an expert in your field
• be a resource for information that is relevant to your audience
• reinforce your style and voice
• give depth and relevance to your brand in an environment you can control

Finding Inspiration

Take for example a few major brands that publish their own magazines: British fashion label Asos’ self-titled magazine includes advertising for products that appeal to their demographic, such as cosmetics, high-end watches and perfumes. They also balance the promotion of their own products by pairing them with complimentary pieces and accessories that work with their customer’s style.

Coscto has it’s very own The Costco Connection, which combines information about what’s new at Costco with a mix of lifestyle and small business articles.

USAA’s USAA Magazine focuses on advice for becoming financially secure, with articles that appeal to it’s wide audience–young and old.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation’s LIVESTRONG Quarterly—delivers compelling profiles and medically stoked articles in a publication that hopes to bolster the Lance Armstrong Foundation’s efforts to ‘make cancer a global priority.’

Each of these do a great job of combining editorial content with promotional content for their products, services, mission or cause. One great thing you will notice about all of them too? They each reinforce their brand through styling and voice, but without seeming like pushy sales collateral.

Getting Started

So how do you even get started creating a brand magazine? Well there are a number of things to consider, the first of which is the actual branding. Much like traditional collateral, a brand magazine should be in line with your  brand’s style and voice, but it where it differs is that a branded magazine needs to be subtle and controlled in how and when you promote your brand. A branded magazine should be designed with the customer’s tastes, interests, style and wants at the forefront; and weave in brand, product or service messaging where it actually enhances editorial and design.

Brand magazines can help you achieve your desired positioning in the minds of your stakeholders and customers. Whether your brand is edgy, luxurious, down to earth, straight to the point, or fun and whimsical, you want that same feeling to come across through your magazine. For most businesses, when you established your branding, you probably came up with words to describe your mission, voice, style and audience.

Put it Down on Paper

Now is the time to grab a piece of paper and start defining the sort of message you want to give to your customer. How do you want to establish your brand? What sort of content will you include, and how should you style it to be in line with your voice, mission and style? Use words to describe your brand and you customer– are they fashion-forward, politically-minded, edgy, traditional, mostly men or women, older, youthful etc?

These are your design principles and the list should be short and sweet. In as few words as possible, make clear the vision for the publication and any keywords people should keep in mind while designing.

Keep this list. Pin it to your wall. It will make for a great litmus test as you move forward and start creating. Every once and awhile go back to the list and be sure you are appealing to your audience and staying true to your brand.

Deciding on Color

This seems like a no-brainer, but coming up with colors that are true to your brand, that you use consistently throughout your magazine, is tougher that it seems. You may find sites like COLOURlovers helpful for exploring colors that work well with your logo or brand colors. Create a palette and save it. Then as you publish new issues, the consistent use of color will also reinforce your brand.

Typography

Now it’s time to define the typefaces to use: sizes, line height, spacing before and after, colors, headline versus body font, etc. With editorial content there is some flexibility in this, but defining a consistent style sheet will maintain the integrity of your publication and brand throughout the publication. Use fancy fonts sparingly, so that they maintain their impact and legibility on the page.

Create a Mock-up Magazine

This will eventually be your style guide, but at first it is a way to flesh out all of the style choices that you will want to make so that you can stay true to your brand. This will also help you keep a visual consistency not only throughout each publication, but also from publication to publication over time. Save this file and use it to start creating your magazine, then keep that original as a starting point for each subsequent issue–it will save you a lot of time!

Now Get Your Brand Out There

Now, you’re ready to publish. If you’re looking for more advice for designing your file, or templates to get you started, remember you can always check out our other Tips & Tricks!

How do you get your brand out there? Have you come up with other unique ways to keep you brand top-of-mind with your customers? Does your organization or company have a branded magazine? Tell us about it below in the comments section!

For many independent organizations, fundraising is typically a part of your member communications. Because of this, if not for other reasons, you must ensure that your materials are concise and compelling to make sure you’re reaching as many members as possible with your message.

Here are a few more tips to consider when composing your next member communication:

Spotlight Individual Members – Profiling a particularly active member can bolster involvement from the rest of the members who will strive to earn the honor as well, and it may drive the spotlighted guest to share the communication with his or her broader online network thus spreading the reach of your group.

Promote Your Social Media Channels – Many alumnae organizations have LinkedIn Groups and local community groups often have Facebook Pages. Whatever your channel, be sure you’re using your printed materials to promote your online social media channels. It’s a fast way to spread your message and it’s easy to communicate last-minute details about upcoming events.

Limit the Real Estate– All members are aware of the need for fundraising so when creating your materials, try to balance your fundraising call to actions with information that will inspire and inform members about your cause, club or organization. Each group will have a different setup, but no matter how many pages your publication is try to balance fundraising efforts with important news and updates.

Be Mindful of the White Space – We’ve spoken a lot about this subject in previous blog posts, and our advice remains the same. Make your images eye-catching and high quality (hire a professional photographer, if possible), but be sure you leave room on each page to avoid overcrowding.

Share your best practices for member communications in the comments below!

We will be taking some time off during the holidays (even a MagCloud elf needs a break now and then) so you may experience some delays in orders, as well as customer support response time.

MagCloud Holiday Schedule:

• Closed: December 24th, December 25th, December 31st and January 1st.
• No Printing or Shipping: December 26th, December 30th and January 2nd

So please expect the following delays:

• 1 day delay for orders placed on December 22nd and 23rd
• 2 day delay for orders placed on December 28th and 29th
• 1 day delay for orders placed on December 30th, 31st and January  1st.

From everyone here at MagCloud we wish your and yours a very Happy Holiday Season!

The MagCloud Team

Well, now you can worry less, because you have MagCloud–and we’re working to make it easier for you. With Ship to Group functionality we can take on the heavy-lifting of drop-shipping to your mailing list and you won’t have to deal with pesky paper-cuts or trips to the post office. Digital distribution gives you the option to share a PDF with your users who prefer to stay up-to-date with their iPad or other digital device. And you can get it all done without having to leave your desk or get out of your PJs (no judgement here).

So since it’s the start of a new year, what better way to turn over a new leaf with your organization, than to turn a glossy page? Your publication can look professional and still be affordable if you publish through MagCloud and we’re going to help you get started right now.

To make the process easier, we created a classic newsletter template designed for printing as a 4-page MagCloud publication (which comes to just 60¢/copy if you order 20 or more copies). It’s easy to edit and available in three software formats. Check out the original and a variation of the template on the left, and then get started creating your own in Adobe InDesign (CS3 or newer), Microsoft Word or Apple Pages. *Please note, you may have to “right-click” or “ctrl+click” to start the download.

Starting with a template is a great trick for speeding up the design process (don’t tell anyone I told you, but a lot of professional designers do it themselves) and many well-designed templates have style sheets built in that make it easy to change fonts and styles with just a few clicks of the mouse. So with a few simple typeface changes, tweaks to color, and some new imagery, you can easily transform this basic template into a newsletter that fits your organization’s image. We used Neutra typefaces and swapped in orange for our example, but how you customize it is up to you.

Want to try a different design?
Depending on your software of choice, you can also find great resources built into some applications or as free downloads in their online resources.

Apple Pages has built-in templates that can be great starting points, just be sure to check your margins and settings because these layouts may need a bit of adjusting so that they are properly centered on the page after printing/trimming. For more detailed help with this task check out the “Add guides to pages and adjust layout for trim” section of last year’s blog post.

Microsoft also has free templates available for Word and Publisher online at office.microsoft.com.

If you’re willing to splurge and buy a template, from an online source like stocklayouts.com, be aware that most of these templates are not designed to MagCloud specs and will need to be adjusted to 8.5″ x 11″ pages in order to output a properly-sized, MagCloud-ready PDF. So before you spend the money, be sure you select a file format for software you are comfortable with, and that you are prepared to make the necessary changes to set the file up to match our PDF guides.

More Resources
Still needing more inspiration? Check out some of our past blog posts for newsletter content and design tips, or great sample publications. And as always you can find all of MagCloud’s design Tips and Tricks and all of our free templates in our Design Resources section of the blog.

Have you found other great templates or resources to use when creating your MagCloud publications? Then please share them below in the comments section.

The voting period has officially closed for our first-ever Portfolio Contest. We received a lot of impressive submissions and are having a blast seeing the work that our publishers do every day. Thank you to all who submitted and voted in the contest.

Winners will be notified in mid-January. Your patience is appreciated during the next few weeks while we sort out the winners. Until then, check out all the great entries on our Facebook page.

A big thank you to our sponsors: Wacom, Pantone and MyFonts. Their products made our prize packs irresistible!

Remember, there will be a total of ten lucky winners. Here’s a little reminder about what you could be taking home.

We appreciate your time and energy and would love to hear any feedback on our contest in the comments section below.

Orange County Orchid Society publishes this monthly newsletter filled with images of the group’s beautiful orchids and to update the group on its members, the latest meeting notes, tips and a few local ads.

American Glass Guild newsletter features a message from the president of the AGG, the latest news on awards and recognition for members and a recap of a recent AGG workshop.

Fort Collins Alumnae Chapter of Delta Delta Delta has several important updates for members such as key upcoming dates, a note from the chapter’s PanHellenic rep, an update on Fall recruitment and plans for several events in the next year.

Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity quarterly publication is a good publication for other Greek organizations to get content tips for. It features a spotlight on outgoing seniors and new members and several editorial pieces from members looking to stretch their writing muscles.

The Pulse is a publication by the Korean American Students of Yale that packs a concise update into six pages including a message from the outgoing board, notes from the most recent board meeting, a look at the top 9 KASY moments of the year and, of course, some funny KASY superlatives. It’s worth noting that each KASY publication is similar in length but the content varies by issue.

Let us know what member communications materials you use to share updates with your members. We want to hear about it

Today we launched two new products into the MagCloud family–Digest Landscape and Flyer.

Digest Landscape is compact and ultra-portable at 8.5″ wide x 5.5″ tall. It’s perfect for portfolios, brochures, catalogs, books and more.  Simply upload an 8.5″ wide x 5.5″ tall PDF and we’ll trim it down by 0.125″ on the top and bottom and 0.25″ on the outside edge to a final size of 8.25″ wide x 5.25″ tall so it’s ready for our professional printing presses.  We’ve also updated our website preview app so users will be able to preview your publication in all it’s landscape glory.

Our double-sided, single sheet Flyer product is ideal for brief messages or content that changes often such as sales promotions, menus, product data sheets, event schedules and more. Simply upload an 8.5″ wide x 11″ tall PDF and we’ll get it ready for printing by trimming it down by 0.125″ on all sides to a final size of 8.25″ wide x 10.75″ tall.  We print Flyer publications as a single sheet with a front and back side, so if you only upload one page don’t worry we’ll automatically add a blank page for the back side.  The Flyer product does require a minimum print order of 10 copies which will be bundled into one shipping order.

We hope you enjoy these new products and would love to hear how you plan to use them in our comments section below.