Response: Judging

Last week, the Advanced Magazine Design class got to help with the preliminary judging of city magazines for a competition. It was a wonderful surprise. I love city/regional magazines because they are a celebration of hometowns. They create a sense of community and even a brand in many cases. I have worked with a city magazine before, and one of the first things that would be said at every meeting was "remember, this is a highlight of all the great things our county has to offer its residents and what those residents bring to the community." Basically, its goal was two-fold: to celebrate what the community brings through businesses and organizations and what how the individuals make up a good community through their work and hobbies. Whenever I am in a different city, I always pick up a city magazine. I still have my first copy of Inside Columbia from when I visited the university in 2010. It has a rooster on the cover.

Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to study each of the magazines that closely, but I know that each one of those is doing that same branding because I have read some of them before. As I have never been on the judging end of a magazine competition, like many of my classmates, I was surprised how limited our time was with each magazine before deciding on our favorites. (Note: We were just evaluating the design, and more professionals are going to be making the final picks.) I felt like I just had a couple of minutes to flip through each edition before being told to move to the next one. However, I did notice a few things. The first was that the covers of the magazines really influenced my overall impression of the magazine. My top-two picks had what I felt were both well-done and out-of-the-box covers. Of my top 3 choices, only one had OK covers. The next thing that jumped out at me was how heavily I weighed the design of the feature. I pretty much skimmed over the department pages, unless something really stood out, and headed right over to the feature. Design elements that made me more likely to choose a magazine were: content-driven design (based on skimming the article in about 30 seconds), creative from month-to-month, good use of "details," such as information boxes; and creative ways to present the information. One of the magazines, I just felt like I was in the city/state as I looked through its pages without it feeling cheesy. It didn't depend on "theme-y" fonts but rather had a good understanding of its audience.

I was pleased that my top choice won out within our class voting.