Online magazine design

To increase engagement and reach a wider audience, we developed an online magazine design that, while feeding from the original printed format for consistency in the user journey, feels fresh and native to a digital platform.

Background

Published twice a year, the Alliance Manchester Business School magazine is distributed widely across Greater Manchester and the rest of the UK as well as internationally to a wide range of organisations, policymakers, academics, alumni and current students of the School.

Available as an online magazine and also in its original printed form, the magazine is full of insightful thought leadership content, including feature interviews with academics from across the School and with students of their PhD, MBA and Executive Education programmes.

The online magazine format benefits from a range of advantages that the HTML5 web technology offers: fully responsive design capabilities regardless of device, tracking of key performance statistics, real-time updates, and an enhanced and more sustainable way to reach audiences, to name just a few.

Challenge

Our client brief asked for the design of a new communication platform for the magazine, introducing a Contents page that would visually organise all articles in one place, and also a new online magazine design that would feed from the printed version to not only ensure consistency in the audience journey, but also to increase engagement and reach a wider audience.

But before any designs were produced, a key requirement we would have to consider right from the start of the project was total conformance with the highest level of web content accessibility guidelines – AAA.

The new online magazine design would also need to offer the option for users to share content, and allow for the inclusion of videos and podcast content.

Solution

Our approach to the online magazine design was to translate a visually strong printed piece into a digital publication that is just as engaging and inviting for the reader.

Visually, the online magazine stands on its own while still establishing a clear connection with its printed ‘parent’ version, which features prominently on the online version, encouraging readers to pick up a copy.

An uncluttered design clearly signposts the next step in the journey, making for a robust user experience.

Articles are organised in modular blocks, with a clear navigation structure that invites readers to click through to a written piece. A simple set of icons indicates that content is also available in podcast or video form, giving the user choice on how they would prefer to consume the content.

Once we had designed and built the template for the online magazine, we uploaded the new magazine content blocks to a new section of the existing web style guide, which we had also developed for AMBS. This block-based approach gives our client flexibility when building new pages for the magazine, as well as offering the ability to update or add new blocks in the future.

For consistency between both magazine formats, with every edition we supply our selection of images curated for the printed magazine so they can also be included in the online version.

The digital platform used for the online magazine also contains a repository with links to previous editions, with the launch of every issue giving the opportunity to discover new insights or revisit content that always feels fresh.

“Everyone loves the new design, the magazine looks amazing. Thank you again for all your efforts, and especially for all the thorough testing to ensure we meet AAA accessibility standards!” 

Marketing team, Alliance Manchester Business School