We gave you a little taste of what it’s like behind the scenes in issue six’s bts video but for issue seven we decided to show you a little bit more of our process. We’ve even made a little video for your to watch!

As always, our design team was given the mammoth task of bringing 88 blank pages to life. The process varies a little from team to team but we wanted to show you what really goes into creating a magazine. This involves designing a brand new grid/template, choosing a new colour palette to work with, selecting a list of fonts to use as well as bringing all the elements together by designing a cohesive magazine with visual imagery. Not much to ask for at all!

Initially there’s a lot of thinking and discussing as the new team try to wrap their heads around the theme of the issue. With a solid understanding of the theme, they move onto developing a template which they’ll use moving forward. Apart from the main articles and recurring elements of the magazine, each team member is offered an opportunity to create/design their own spread. These spreads are used as resting pages between larger articles to give readers a break. It’s quite the task if you’re a fresh and young designer but most take on this challenge and end up creating something pretty amazing. This gives each designer the chance to really explore their main strengths or to just experiment a little and design something that they can call their own.

While all of this is swirling around in their heads, they also have to come up with an idea for the cover. We’ve challenged them as we’ve made one explicit requirement. They had to use the proofing press. Which isn’t all too bad expect there are severe restraints on what you can do. They all met this challenge well (as you can see for yourself).

Once the articles are ready to be designed they’re handed off to a member of the team to have a read, to interpret and then to design. Visuals aren’t often sent along with the articles… actually 99% of the time there are no visuals. It is then up to the designer to either source imagery or create something for the article, this could be creating an illustration, photographing something or using their design skills to create a typographic treatment. We (Felix and myself, Anne) try to push them out of their comfort zones in regards to design, to be as experimental as possible. Suggestions are made, feedback given and iterations created before we all settle on a final design.

The cover isn’t the only thing different about this issue, we’ve decided to change it up a little bit with the format of the magazine itself. The size of the magazine technically hasn’t changed but we are including all of the colour bars, crop marks and bleed. This lets us alter the dimensions of the magazine without actually increasing it.

We can’t wait for you to get your hands on Ligature Journal issue Seven! Purchase a copy by heading to Tiliqua Press.