What to send your magazine designer, and in what format

Most magazine projects that go badly do not go badly during design. They go badly in the fortnight beforehand, while somebody tries to work out which version of the copy is current and whether the logo exists as anything other than a PNG pulled off the website.

This is the handover we ask for, and why each part of it matters.

Copy

Send one document per article, in Word, Google Docs or plain text.

Rough is fine — genuinely. Unfinished sentences and a note saying "need a stat here" are more useful than a polished document that arrives three weeks later.

What costs time:

• Copy inside slide decks. Extracting text from PowerPoint is slow and error-prone, and something always gets missed.
• Copy inside PDFs. Worse, because line breaks come through as real characters and every paragraph has to be repaired.
• Copy inside email bodies, spread across a thread, with revisions in replies. This is the worst case and it is surprisingly common.

Also send a word count target per article if you have one. If you do not, tell us how many pages you want and we will tell you the counts to write to. Getting this the wrong way round — writing first, then discovering it is double the space available — is the most common cause of a late round of cuts.

Photographs

Originals. Not versions that have been through a document, a chat app, or a website.

Every one of those strips resolution. An image that was 4000px when it left the camera arrives at 900px after a round trip through WhatsApp, and no amount of work brings it back.

Minimums we work to:

• 2000px on the long edge for anything intended to run large or full-bleed
• 1200px for smaller placements
• 300dpi at final size if the issue will be printed

Send more than you think is needed. A ratio of five to one — five candidates for every image that runs — gives real choice about what goes large, and choice is most of what makes a spread work.

If you have a shoot coming up, brief the photographer for horizontal and vertical versions of key shots. Covers are portrait. Spreads are landscape. A library that is entirely one orientation constrains the design badly.

Figures and charts

The spreadsheet, not a picture of the chart.

Charts get rebuilt to match the issue's type and palette, so a screenshot only tells us what the chart said, not what it should contain. Send the underlying numbers and say which comparison matters — the point you want the reader to take is a design decision, not just a data one.

Brand

• Logo as SVG, EPS or PDF. A PNG cannot be scaled or recoloured cleanly, and a logo lifted from a website is almost always too small for a cover.
• Guidelines, if they exist.
• Fonts, along with confirmation you hold a licence permitting print use. Many web font licences do not.

Most brand guidelines cover stationery and slides but say nothing about editorial. That is normal. We extend them into a magazine system and show you the reasoning — but knowing where the guidelines stop saves a round of corrections.

The things people forget

• Captions and credits. Who is in the photograph, and who took it. Almost always missing, and always needed.
• Contents structure. A rough running order, even if it changes.
• Legal lines. Registration numbers, disclaimers, the colophon.
• Last year's issue, if there was one. Enormously useful, including when the brief is "not like that".

A note on how to send it

One folder, one link, one structure — Drive, Dropbox, WeTransfer, anything. Named subfolders for copy, images and brand. Files named for what they are.

It sounds trivial. It reliably saves several days across a project, because every hour a designer spends working out which file is current is an hour not spent on the magazine you are paying for.

If you are missing several of these, enquire anyway. In most cases the answer is that what you have is enough to start, and we will tell you what to gather while the first spreads are being designed.