My Egg Noodles

Since I started working on my first magazine project there have been many surprises along the way, which ultimately means new learning, handling and decisions. It’s been a stressful month, but it’s also been a lot of fun.

One of the biggest surprises that slapped me in the face was how much time little features take, I think we all take for granted how long incorporating design, text and layout takes with any magazine or web site we view. Take our sales page for example, if you were to look at it you’d think a competent graphic designer could have knocked it up within a day, but with my strict quality control it’s taken a week due to hundreds of edits… some fairly big such as replacing an image that would take half a day to find a replacement for, to small tweaks like changing the font colour 20 times.

Today was a milestone, for me anyway, for the first time in months the magazine has actually started looking like a real mag! I’m so happy with the design and how the content is layed out, I now feel like all the editing was worth the while! I got to say, in terms of design, navigation and functionality, it leaves our competition way behind. Great!

Now let’s move on to any magazines bread and butter, the content.

Another surprise is how much I hate playing the editing role, I hate proof reading and touching up text here and there. I originally thought I’d be able to get into the swing of this but I haven’t. Editing is not a role I wish to pursue. I have decided that I need to find someone to take over as an editor in chief, so as soon as the magazine has launched this will be on the top of my list of things to do.

The great thing about starting new projects, even if most don’t kick off as you had planned, is that you get to learn so much. Everyday I seem to be making a mental notes to myself that I shouldn’t do that again – It gives me a real buzz!

So where does the mag stand now? The overall design is complete, the advertising has been implemented nicely, all we have to do now is add our text based articles into the site. This shouldn’t take to long. It should be ready to lunch within a few days, but I’m going to add a couple of extra days for safe measure and say we’ll be launching the mag next Friday.