Content - Fall 2007 - (Page 23) Content There are general guidelines, however. Lifestyle magazines make heavy use of photography because they are usually about subjects that lend themselves to good pictures, such as travel, dining or sports. A lifestyle book, says Seibert, is enhanced by “full-page, luxurious features, but not so much in a corporate finance magazine.” Photography is also more appropriate for custom publications that are news-oriented. When Home Builder switched to a journalistic approach, it also went from predominantly black-and-white to color throughout the magazine. However, Betz advises that illustrations can provide additional layers of information on extremely complex ideas that are hard to represent in photographs. “If the subject is vapor ware or something that isn’t yet quite complete,” he says, an artist can take the idea and give it life—such as with a concept car. on the web Finally, there’s the question of how your magazine’s design should make the digital journey (or not) to your website. In general, Spafax’s Basu counsels, “websites for any magazine should remain within the print publication’s overall look, but given the different medium, should not be a complete copy. This depends entirely on the overall design template in print. Often it’s quite simple to just transfer the main design elements from print onto the web.” If your magazine does not have a distinct website, however, this may not be possible. Home Builder magazine, for example, does not have a web version because the association site is not restricted to members only, and the publication is only sent to the 1,300 association members. And Lexus magazine on the web does not exist independently, but lives on the lexus.com site, so “there is a nod to the Lexus branding that goes on there,” says Betz. “It’s sort of a hybrid because we’re not sure where the [online] readers are coming from.” A picture may or may not be worth a thousand words, but no magazine, custom-published or not, can flourish without creative and original design. “Custom publications are there to create relationships between our clients and their customers,” concludes Basu. “If we create magazines that look like everything else, that don’t engage the reader/customer, we aren’t doing our job. A magazine that stands out and demands attention is a magazine that’s working.” Jack Feuer is a Los angeLes-based writer and editor who has covered media, marketing and advertising For more than two decades. he is the editoriaL director oF ucLa magazine and a coLumnist For mediapost.com. A reader in Switzerland, recalls David Betz, creative director for Story Worldwide and global creative director for Lexus magazine, couldn’t believe the luxury automaker’s quarterly custom publication wasn’t written for the Swiss and then translated around the world. “The Swiss,” Betz notes, “are picky about their translations.” Truth is, though, Lexus magazine, Swiss style, is only one of nine different languages in which the magazine appears. In fact, Lexus is read in 50 different countries—by 800,000 Lexus owners in North America alone—and produces 580 original pages per quarterly issue. The title won five Custom Publishing Council Pearl Awards for excellence in 2005. “It’s a lifestyle magazine, photography-driven, and what we want to do is create an experience similar to the car, so the production values, the photography, the stories are on par with some of the best that you’d find in the world,” says Betz. “We take great pains to make sure that design is integral so our editors can think in terms of visual treatments and our designers can think in terms of editorial. That’s how to tell the Lexus story.” The way that Story’s Lexus team of 20 core and extended staffers around the world accomplish their mission is by adopting their client’s obsession with perfection through the Japanese concept of kaizen, or continuous improvement. It is a process that includes every member of an organization from top to bottom, relentlessly seeks better ways to produce cars or a magazine, focuses on process as well as results, and encourages thinking of the big picture, rather than the kind of siloed approach that stifles innovation elsewhere. It was kaizen that produced Lexus magazine’s philosophy of regional resonance, something that extends down to relatively minor elements like the sidebars of feature stories. For example, Betz offers, “if it’s a story about olive oil in Italy, the sidebar might be about the top five olive oil producers in your area. There’d be one for North America and another for Japan.” Another result of the Lexus pursuit of perfection is backup covers, prepared for every issue. Most of the time, the cover image is the same everywhere, but for the 10 percent of the time that certain images are more appropriate for a specific region, the alternate cover is available. For example, one cover on an exhibition in Milan where the luxury manufacturer had a presence ran globally. But in Japan, Lexus magazine had done a lot of stories in previous issues about the same subject. So they picked up a backup cover image, a beautiful picture of a koi pond, linked to a story that also took place in Japan. “Elegance and simplicity, variety in pacing, some surprises, these things are important to people, says Betz. “We are advocates for our readers. We don’t jump stories to the back of the book. You don’t have to wade through 125 pages of ads until you get to the table of contents. There are regional sidebars and invitations to go onto the web. Our mission is to make this the most successful luxury automotive publication in the world. And the most effective.” Jack Feuer Pursuing Perfection in Print The Magazine of the Custom Publishing Council PREMIERE ISSUE 23 http://lexus.com http://ediapost.com
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