Black flag dummies...

Page 2:

I've done this with an eye to having these pages in full coluor, there wouldh ave to be a slight redesign to take into account the increased importance of contrast and greyscaling for a black and white publication. The sidebars I'm using here would be sparing, and use a very different font and subheading system to further mark them off from the body text. The full content are displayed large and spaced out, and I've avoided using a big advert on the facing page, which is fairly standard, in favour of a small advert and a pic of a ladybird (see below).

Page 3:

The ladybird (red and black, innit ) is a preliminary idea for what would ideally be a series of shots throughout the life of the magazine (or until a revamp is done) of ladybirds and/or anything else we'd like to see in the way of artful photography. I'd actually extend this as well to do a full A4 size pic on the back page by anyone who does a particularly good photo and wants to send it in. This helps brighten up the magazine without us havign to hunt around for stuff ideally as we rely on people to effectively send in what they do as a hobby/matter of course.

Page 4:

K ignore text on all this, I've just been C+Ping or using lorem ipsum (text generator). Also forgive the poor quality of the pic, I did it to give an idea of what can be done to effectively provide breaks in the text and lift the page without having to travel around the country taking pics of hospitals for example. Symbolism using a digital camera set to hi-res can provide us with quite a lot of decent quality ilustrative shots.

In terms of fonts, I've tended towards serif and less beefy looks, this helps give the page a less cluttered appearance. The text is also justified, as this keeps the lines clean (important on an A4 page).

Page 5:

Note that here I've used a basic big quote and generic medical pic (X-ray of a dog with arthritis, incidentally!) to again break up the text. highly important is keeping within the bounds of the columns, otherwise it makes the whole thing look like a train wreck. This is the most basic kind of layout.

Page 5: Final page I'm giong to do on a basic feature. Included for the sake of showing both a basic table layout using a similar colour pallette (shades of cyan) to the contents page - continuity - and the form for a pic when imbedded in text from the page edge (as opposed to above, below or inside).

Page 6 (or 28 if reeading the contents page ):

This is page one of a two page spread directly lifted from libcom's history and library sections. I've used a manipulated font to signpost what the article is about (ie. history) and a subhead about the main headline to build people up to it. Again, pic is taken from Libcom. This would be a very easy way to both fill a couple of pages every issue and put interesting educational material in the magazine. I've placed it provisionally near the back as a strong finisher for the paper (ideally these pages would be in the same place every issue to encourage a sense of continuity).

Page 9:

And last but by no means least this page shows again a generic picture to lift the content (the coffee cup could be a recurring theme I suspect to make peopel feel like they're relaxing reading this stuff rather than wading through it), and a basic libcom advert strap at the bottom to entice people online to read more abuot the ideology etc.

I chose the situationist summation for a couple of reasons. This kind of summation - chopped down to the bare bones and understandable - is the kind of theory education work Black Flag could do extremely well, and then follow in a future issue with a longer debate piece on the same subject in a contemporary context for example.

Right, that's yo8ur lot, sorry bout the length of it Libcom ppl hope that's okay, I wanted to do the whole thing illustrated for forum users to see all at once..

Tacks: two reasons, one I don't have the old logo for Flag on my computer, two unless you have a truly excellent logo simple words are better.

NB// and before pepople complain that the pages are wonky, leaving a bigger gap on the inside folding edge is standard practice for magazines so people don't end up having to squint down the spine to read stuff.

Nah this is in relation to The end of Black Flag thread, hence calling it a dummy.

No need to stand on formalities, call me Saii .

Indeed it is, not to mention expertise (I mean the layout I've done above is a fairly basic one cos and I've already set up a library and style sheet for it, but it'd still need someone with a reasonable degree of skill with quark to do it for example, and that's way before any of the other stuff if you want to do it properly).

But on the other hand, our alternative is to continue watching some of the brightest talents around fritter their time away on half-projects and internicine bickering while our media continues to lag behind everyone else, so I reckon it's worth a shot to build the idea up properly from the start rather than aim at somethinng less which has only the potential for mediocrity.

Quark's actually pretty good for that sort of thing, we've managed to move files from Macs to PCs and only the fonts warped. It's pretty robust. Having said that, writers should NEVER lay out their own stuff ideally, it's extremely bad practice cos it means the checking process loses a stage and more spelling errors get through, not to mention libels, holes in the story and questions going unanswered.

Everything's flexible afaic, this is a dummy rather than a finished article, though yeah on the whole too many review pages will overload a mag (in 32 pages four maybe would be good, for preference one of those being a full page ad-feature).