The marketing and communications teams of professional services firms understand branding: they produce highly effective, branded material every day. But designing a compelling client magazine requires a different skill-set, one that in-house designers do not tend to have since they rarely get to work on such publications.

Here are ten tricks of the trade that will help your magazine to stand out from the crowd.

1. Creative stretch

If you produce a magazine rigidly, following brand guidelines created for your other collateral, you will end up with something that resembles a newsletter or brochure. A compelling client magazine has a visual identity that works within the branding, taking just enough from the guidelines to remain on brand and be demonstrably part of the stable.

2. Knowing when to stop

An experienced magazine designer will know exactly how far to push the branding guidelines, and go just far enough. Getting carried away with design for its own sake will risk ending up with a publication that is so far from the heart of the corporate branding that it ceases to do its job as part of the marketing mix.

3. Coherence and consistency

The balance at the heart of good magazine design is to give each article its own identity but also fit it into the overall magazine. There needs to be enough variety so that each article is distinctive and attractive, and yet enough consistency for the magazine to feel like a coherent whole. This is achieved through adhering to certain rules with fonts, grids and styles, while leaving room for individual creativity within the features.

4. Hierarchy is vital

The pecking order of what is most important on the page needs to be reflected in the design. This enables the reader to know where to start, and provides additional entry points on pages to draw them in. So, for example, you may use the design to throw emphasis on the headline and standfirst to guide readers. You may then use pull-quotes and crossheads as subsequent entry points.

5. Focus on clarity

You might like to use an interesting illustration. You may want call-outs to catch attention or tables for explanation. Then there are headshots for client connection and colour for emphasis. Put this all on one page, however, and you will render the feature unreadable. Consider that less can be more and give white space as much priority as other design elements.

6. Iterative and innovative

Resist the temptation of a simple, repetitive template onto which you drop the copy of each issue. Although there are magazines that work on this basis, each issue looks like a poor imitation of the last and clients will not get beyond the poly-wrap. Each issue and each article has to be iterative and innovative, with covers in particular needing to fit the overall identity, whilst feeling different enough to create an impact.

7. Partnering with editorial

Design is not just about making things look attractive and having the story ‘run around’ the pictures. Andrew Beswick, art director with Grist, says: “It’s only as a designer matures that they appreciate how close they need to be to the editorial. Once you understand the objectives of the magazine and the underlying messages, it becomes clear how the design can work hand in hand with the words.”

8. Selling the editorial

The design doesn’t just have to fit around the needs of the copy, it needs to work hard for it. Good design should spell out benefits and interest to readers. They should be drawn to the copy by the design strength of cover lines, contents descriptions, standfirsts and pull-quotes – and they should be motivated to take action after reading it with compact and cleverly designed call to action panels after every article.

9. Improving navigability

The design should make it easy for readers and clearly identify different types of content, such as research, opinion, interview, client cases, services description, book reviews and adverts etc. These should all clearly come together as a coherent whole, but the nature of each feature should be clear at a glance.

10. Appropriate picture selection

Pictures that work well for a brochure will not necessarily do the job for editorial. They share some of the same purposes: to make the page look attractive and to draw the attention of readers, while fitting with the overall brand. However, in an editorial environment they need to do much more or they will feel like an advert or advertorial. The difference may be as subtle as selecting photos that don’t look contrived or posed, but getting it right is critical.

People say that ‘good design should not be seen’. They are right … good design should create a feeling that everything is as it should be, nothing is out of place: It looks the part, but you can’t quite put your finger on why.