Create: Flemming Bo Jensen Magazine Test

I’ve featured a lot of publications here at Shifter and I will continue to do so. There are a myriad of reasons NOT to print. Most are complete nonsense. Most involved inabilities. Inability to edit. Inability to sequence. Inability to design. Inability to choose materials. Inability to take chances. In some ways, I understand finding reasons NOT to do something. Heck, on Thursday the high is in the 30s with sleet and snow. Do I want to go hiking? Yes. Might I find a reason NOT to go. Yes, well, okay, maybe.

So when someone goes through the process and makes something I like to feature it. Flemming is no stranger to publications, and not just with Blurb. He recently landed his first traditionally published book and it’s a BEAUTY.

But he recently did some Blurb Magazine testing and I wanted to share those with you now. I’m surprised this is the first time that Flemming has tested the magazine path because it really is a natural fit for his work. Good size, inexpensive and lends itself to a reoccurring print ideal.

As you will see, Flemming chose to design a “spine on top” version of the magazine. Now don’t panic. This has been done many times before. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, but that’s okay. It’s well worth the experiment and that is the point I want to make. Flemming is EXPERIMENTING. This is one of the major keys to self-publishing. Remember, you ONLY have to print one copy so taking a few chances is something that should be part and parcel to the process. You then study what worked, what didn’t and then you move on. Flemming made a few points I wanted to share with you.

·  Never done a Blurb magazine before so I wanted to test it out

·  Used Bookwright and quickly threw together two magazines

·  1. “Solkongen” is just a recent epic gig I did and is a standard portrait orientated magazine. The mag looks great, but my test shows that I find too much is lost in the gutter as I use a lot of center composition. I will remake this mag someday with copy + flip the whole magazine to horizontal

·  2. Portfolio – is just a portfolio mag for me to carry, this was made horizontal (super easy in Bookwright, I just made a new page template with pre-rotated image containers)

·  I tried to pair images in the Portfolio mag so they fit or compliment – or contrast each other – in a spread, this works well. 

·  Portfolio mag works great, except I did not cull it enough haha. Everything looks great on-screen when you have to physically browse it you start to realize that you get tired of flipping pages and I could stand losing some spreads!

·  I really like the printing quality, I find only cyan colors seem to block out completely, rest looks great!