MagCloud publisher Hacker Monthly recently wrote a great blog post about how they go about designing a magazine. They shared their experience as “non designers” and how they mastered using Adobe InDesign.
Here’s an excerpt of the post:
The questions I’ve got the most since I started Hacker Monthly are “How do you design the magazine?”, “What tools do you use?” and “What books/tutorials do you recommend?”. This post answers all of the questions (and possibly more).
As you might already know, I’m not a designer. My only design experience is drafting up the simplest looking website or user interface in Adobe Fireworks (I never really gotten my way around Photoshop). When I was starting up Hacker Monthly, I wanted to outsource the design since I have zero experience in print. This turns out pretty costly, so I decided to do it myself. Now, it’s the part of the job that I love the most.
To start, learn to use Adobe InDesign. The first version of Hacker Monthly was designed using Pages. It looked okay, but it just doesn’t have that magazine feel. So countless hours of tutorials and books later, I ended up using InDesign. It’s the best tool you can use. To save you the trouble, the only tutorial you need to see is Nigel French’s Designing a Magazine Layout Hands-on Workshop on Lynda.com. Nigel French is exceptionally good at guiding through the total newbie (umm…me) on both magazine design principles and using InDesign professionally.
To read the full post please visit the Hacker Monthly blog.
Publisher's Corner 