There is great value in staying on top of a selection of creative blogs out there, and any designer worth their salt has an RSS reader bustling with the latest articles from these media. However, the content, the perspectives and the platform that a magazine provides contributes something which blogs, for all their good intentions, cannot hope to reproduce as of yet. Blogs are intended to be of-the-moment, and sites such as Smashing Magazine — to use the most ubiquitous example — have made a name for themselves by publishing highly current web design trends, techniques and inspiration.

However, for all of Smashing’s plusses, sites like it tend to focus largely on what other members of the exact same field are up to: not the ideal way to open up a creative’s mind. Creativity is best realized as the product of multiple sources of knowledge and inspiration, and mixing too sharp of a focus on one particular industry with a devout following of readers can only lead to a widespread culture of sameness — a development which has largely already happened. When these sites do provide round-ups of other fields of creativity, they tend to be fairly weak and lack the insight which comes as a result of a magazine’s professional, dedicated efforts.

Now, I’m not slagging blogs for the sake of it, as there are a tremendous number of high-quality ones out there. However, they offer only one piece of the inspirational puzzle, and any creative who has ambitions beyond maintaining the status quo owe it to themselves to broaden their horizons and push their own influences to take in work and insight from a variety of creative fields. A wider range of influences can only result in stronger creative work, as you never know where your next idea come from, whether it’s tomorrow or six months from now.

So, I’ve gathered together a list of a few magazines which, to my mind, act as a global compass for the best of the best. These are magazines which may focus on one particular creative niche or they may not, but the point is that the resources propelling these publications result in editorial content, scope and quality that is beyond compare.

Hand-in-hand with editorial quality is the experience of reading a magazine. Whether in print or digital format, it is an entirely different experience to reading a blog, one which engages the mind in a deeper way and makes a far greater impact on the reader’s mind.

Several months ago, Smashing posted a similar post listing several print magazines for designers to read, and while some of those magazines are good, a good number of them could go out of business tomorrow and nobody would be any worse off. But it’s my heartfelt opinion that, should the publications below go out of business, a void would be created in the global creative discourse that any website I’ve come across would be hard-pressed to fill.

Full disclosure: I work as the community coordinator and online editor at Applied Arts. However, I hold the magazines I’ve named below in the highest regard as essential measuring sticks of the creative industry. Whatever their editorial or geographical focus, these publications all deserve a spot at the collective media table.

Communication Arts

Long considered the North American champion of the creative industry, Communication Arts canvases the global creative industry with in-depth editorial and quality profiles, but most importantly through their awards. Regarded as one of the industry’s best competitions, if your name’s in the CA annuals, you know you’re on to something.

Creative Review

Focused more on editorial than awards (though that’s changing), Creative Review is based in the UK and focuses largely on the European creative industry, with dispatches from around the world. Also focused more on design-related issues than other fields, it provides a wealth of insight and knowledge, whether it’s profiles of the hottest studios, the latest books, conference reviews or intellectual opinion pieces. Bonus points for ongoing typographic coverage.

Eye

Not published as often as CR or CA, but perhaps the deepest of the lot, Eye magazine is an absolute treasure. Focused on graphic design, packed with deep, insightful articles, lovingly produced and stuffed with gorgeous imagery, Eye is the world’s journal on graphic design. A must.

Applied Arts

Focused on the Canadian creative community, the closest cousin would be Communication Arts. Most creative disciplines are covered within Canadian borders, with occasional explorations into international issues or other related creative fields such as industrial design.

PDN

The photography industry’s flag-bearer. I must admit that I haven’t read an issue in a long time so things may have changed, but it’s one of the pre-eminent places for photographic news and inspiration. There may be better alternatives to PDN, but I’ve not come across them yet.

IDN

Essentially a cousin of Eye’s, IDN is still a strong publication that covers the global design industry. The editorial coverage is superb, the layout is constantly trying new things (sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much), and you’re pretty much guaranteed a wealth of new ideas by the time you put the issue down.

CREATIVITY and Graphis

These two were two of the best in their day, but have transformed in recent years. Creativity stopped publishing at the end of 2009 and moved entirely online on a subscription-based model, but they offer a quality overview of the creative industry, skewed more towards advertising than other fields.

Graphis, meanwhile, put out a magazine but were also amongst the best awards in the industry. The magazine is no longer printed, but their awards are still going and are published instead in a tome of a book, with different books for each competition. Looking at the back issues of Graphis is looking through the best of the creative business since the second world war.

The Character Palette

At first glance, the Character palette is pretty straightforward. You can select a typeface, its style, the leading (the space between lines), tracking (the overall spacing between characters) and kerning (the space between an individual set of characters) as well as some text distortion options. While simple in function and layout, control over a wide variety of typographical options exist within this palette, particularly with regards to tracking, kerning and leading.

The hidden side of the Character palette can be discovered through the drop-down context menu. In this menu, a wealth of other options is available: overall OpenType settings for contextual replacements and other OpenType features; type styles, whether all caps, small caps, strike-through, etc; as well as further options for both underline and strike-through. The OpenType settings allow you great control over selecting which OpenType features you want to enable for this paragraph. The side benefit to both the strike-through and underline options that is you can use these to highlight live text within the text box itself, as opposed to having to create a separate rectangular object to draw attention to a particular word or phrase. When digging a little deeper, we discover that the Character palette has much more to offer than just simply allowing us to choose a typeface and size.

The Paragraph Palette

The Paragraph palette, meanwhile, allows for over-arching control suited to creating the shape of the paragraph itself. Justification, alignment & hyphenation options abound, and these allow for a wide degree of control over the typographical color of a paragraph or page, providing macro-level adjustments which affect entire bodies of text.

Where the fun begins, much like with the Character Palette, is with the drop-down context menu. The first two options are for Single-Line or Paragraph Composers. Single-Line optimizes the hyphenation and justification options for each individual line, whereas Paragraph optimizes lines based on the needs of the entire paragraph. For example, Paragraph will adjust the spacing and hyphenation of an earlier line to make room if a later line in the paragraph contains a troublesome word, whereas Single-Line would simply adjust the paragraph on a line by line basis.

Some other options within the context menu for the Paragraph palette include links to the menus for Hyphenation and Justification (more on that shortly), an option to balance the ragged lines of a non-justified paragraph, options for bullets & numbering for lists and other larger-scale options. Once again, the depth of InDesign’s typographical control really shines through within the context menu of a particular palette.

The Glyph Palette

We’re only going to take a quick look at the Glyph palette, as it’s not as deep as the other two, but it is still quite useful. Basically, the Glyph palette contains every character for the font you’re working with. The principle use for the Glyph palette is for the manual substitution of a selected character or set of characters within your document for ones you choose from the palette itself. Some uses for this could include subbing in old style numerals to replace lining, or manually inserting ligatures. The other main use for the Glyph palette is the creation of Glyph sets.

A Glyph set is a collection of glyphs which you might use on a regular basis, regardless of which typeface or style it is. Let’s say you’re a fan of a particular set of old-style figures and use it across multiple documents, regardless of any other design factors. Creating a glyph set containing those old-style figures allows you to quickly and easily find them and insert them into a document without having to go digging through each font for the right options.

Hyphenation

The control we have over hyphenation with InDesign is unreal and, particularly when combined with the justification controls, can result in some really slick paragraphs which let the text breathe and helps captivate the reader’s interest. We can reach the hyphenation controls through the context menu in the Paragraph palette, which gives us a pop-up dialogue box containing the hyphenation controls. While what each option does is self-explanatory, there are a couple of guidelines which can help your text sing.

Proper hyphenation requires some care and supervision, but can be generally controlled through the hyphenation options. In general, we should leave at least two characters on the start line, and have at least three on the finishing line; with InDesign, we’d set that as hyphenating after the first 2 letters but before the last 3. We should also avoid more than three consecutive hyphenated lines, to prevent a distracting rag. Any word shorter than 5 is too short to require hyphenation (though you can set this as low as 3), and in general, the last word should not be hyphenated in order to prevent any widows. InDesign can take care of all these more automatic hyphenating tasks, leaving the subjective ones (such as avoiding hyphenation where It awkwardly int-terupts a word, etc) to us to remedy.

Justification

Like hyphenation, we reach the justification panel through Paragraph palette’s context menu. The options for justification are self-explanatory, but the real benefits don’t kick in until we begin to explore a bit. Word spacing will adjust the spacing of words, and generally a range of 80%-100%-120% will give us a decently spaced paragraph without too much distraction. Letter spacing, meanwhile, can afford some flexibility as well; in general, a range of -5%-0-5% is ideal. Glyph scaling affords another means to “tweak” the words to make a paragraph optimally justified, and generally around 95%-100%-105% will allow the glyphs enough room to adjust without being noticeably larger or smaller.

There’s also options to adjust the auto leading percentage as well as single-word justify; 120% is InDesign’s default for leading, and typically single words should be aligned left. Through all these different adjustments, ensure that the drop-down menu for Composer is set to Paragraph in order to set the engine to adjust for the paragraph as a whole, not each individual line.

These are general guidelines which I’ve found make a decent, workable range. Each paragraph might call for different settings, but like all things design, smaller changes are preferable to sweeping ones. When combining the features of hyphenation with justification, some really beautiful paragraphs are possible which stretch from margin to margin, without rivers, orphans and widows or any other distractions.

That’s a Wrap

InDesign is a powerful program which, unfortunately, doesn’t enjoy the same widespread appeal in the tutorial & blogging world as Photoshop or other programs in the Creative Suite. However, the wide range of options and tools available to you makes it the ideal program for working with typography. I hope you found this post useful, as it barely scratches the surface for what InDesign is capable of with type.