Magazine design: lessons for proposals
Tan Parmar of design agency Redwood was another of the presenters at last month’s UKAPMP conference. I enjoyed his comments on designing magazine covers: the parallels to proposals are evident. “Covers are really important,” Tan explained. “A good cover should encapsulate the mood and tone of the magazine.”
His design checklist for a good magazine cover? Simplicity, clean typography, and visual impact. Not many of the proposal covers I see – often cluttered and uninspiring – would pass the test.
Tan also outlined one of the benefits of good design: “when you’re skimming through the magazine, you can access information really, really quickly.” Again, that’s so similar to our world, where evaluators need to be able to navigate our documents quickly and easily, whilst absorbing our key messages.
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For one of my favorite proposals, our theme was a well known magazine which specializes in reporting for consumers their test results of household items and ranking each model in a variety of ways, including measles charts.
“Emulating” the cover, layout and tables so our proposal could pass in a quick glance for an issue of this magazine was instructional, as well as effective.
While the client loved it, my team learned a lot about streamlining the message through layout and formatting. Their writing was already exquisite, and this was the logical next step for their development.
Hi, Laura – great anecdote: thanks for sharing.
I led a team that did something similar a while back. We were bidding to one of the world’s largest media organisations. Our proposal went in looking just like one of their newspapers. It worked a treat!