Letters & Journals Magazine Front Cover

We have been busy working on the prototype for the first issue of Letters & Journals. What do you think of the cover? The illustration was done by award winning children's book illustrator, Christina Rodriguez. If you want to see more of Christina's work, you can check out her blog.

Kathy Forss at DaisyMaeDesign worked her magic to bring everything together on the cover. We are still finalizing some decisions about what goes where, but we expect to have the prototype sent to the printer next week.

The prototype will be a printed issue of the look and feel of the magazine. I've posted some of what Kathy created this past year; feature articles, a letters column, a journals column, and the table of contents section. These are the pages that will go into the prototype to give advertisers a sense of what the magazine is all about.

I'm feeling really good about where things are at and I expect the momentum to continue as we go to the next step- the website.

Stationery Shopping in San Francisco

A city-by-city stationery shopping guide is the sample magazine feature you see to the right. This one features San Francisco where there is a wealth of stationery stores and pen companies. Future editions of Letters & Journals will feature such cities as New York, Paris, Chicago, London, Hong Kong, Minneapolis and Denver.

This magazine feature is still being tweaked and Kathy Forss at DaisyMaeDesign is busy finding more stationery related photos to replace the more generic ones in this layout. Don't you love it? When I first saw this design it took my breath away. I don't think the scanned photo does justice to what should be a 2 page magazine layout (with more pages to follow).

Do you have a lot of stationery stores where you live? Where do you like to shop? What city would you like to see featured in the magazine?

Department Pages for Letters & Journals

Here is the first look at a sample of one of the department pages of the magazine Letters & Journals. I was so excited to see this when Kathy at DaisyMaeDesign sent it to me this week.

There will be 3-4 departments for articles on journals and 3-4 departments for articles on letter writing. This picture is a sample from one of the journal departments. In a later post I will show a sample of a Feature article.

I love the font she chose for the 'Journal Themes' heading as well as the placement for the title and the byline. I also like how she left a lot of white space so that the page is not crowded and tight.

One of my favorites things is how the background at the top of the page changes with the article background of the article. It's intoxicating thinking of all the stories that will be featured here.

I also am quite pleased with the red page number and the black magazine logo at the bottom of the page. They contrast each other nicely.

My next blog will be a sampling of the Letter department layout followed by a preview of the magazine's flag (or logo) for the cover.