A first magazine issue is simultaneously thrilling and chaotic. You’ve probably got a handful of article ideas, a list of cool photos, a couple of concepts for the cover, your favorite colors, and a folder full of references, but you still need a central core around which everything else can cohere. A focused theme is the element that turns those disparate ideas into one complete issue. Without a strong theme, your table of contents reads like a list of unrelated concepts, and each page starts to read like a different magazine.
A helpful theme will be more specific than a broad topic. Something like “art,” “travel,” or “food” can be a lot to fit into a first issue, because each of those subjects could easily fill hundreds of pages. Instead, look for a more focused theme like “small studio living in the city,” “weekend hikes in Chicago,” or “simple dinner recipes to cook when you’re exhausted.” While your theme can still encompass a wide variety of content, it does give your issue a specific purpose. And if you can describe your issue with a single sentence, it’s usually much easier to start creating the flatplan for the issue.
Before you go anywhere near InDesign or Canva, come up with one sentence that describes what your magazine is about. Then, create three to five article ideas to accompany that sentence. If something feels great and you want to include it, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the first sentence you created, it should be set aside for your next issue rather than shoehorned in now. This is when your first magazine often becomes bloated. Every idea feels good, so no ideas ever get cut. A great first issue doesn’t feel cohesive because you included as much as you could; it feels cohesive because you selected what belonged.
Once your theme has been chosen, it can guide how you structure the issue. Your first issue could feature an editorial up front, then a larger story, followed by a more focused sidebar or interview, and finally a resource guide. The specifics can shift, but each page needs to earn its spot. Without the support of the main theme, even a beautiful feature, sidebar, or image story can make the issue feel disconnected.
A great thing to do is to review your magazine in thumbnail size. List your page numbers on a thumbnail-sized version of your flatplan, and then indicate each page’s purpose (Cover, Table of Contents, Lead Story, Feature, Sidebar, Gallery, Closing Page, etc.). Ask yourself whether the order of these pages makes logical sense. This can help you identify when you’ve repeated a certain format, when transitions between pages are weak, or when the cover story is a completely different topic from the rest of the issue. It’s a lot easier to resolve these problems while designing than it is to start reworking all your spreads.
The theme of your magazine can also influence its style. A quiet, meditative magazine needs more breathing room, softer image crops, and a subtle hierarchy. A lively magazine demands stronger contrast, more typographic scale, and a quick visual pace. The goal here isn’t for every page of the issue to look identical. The goal is to allow your theme to shape decisions around type treatments, color palettes, image sizes, image captions, pull quotes, and page spacing.
A focused theme is what makes your magazine’s content practical. It tells you which drafts you need to refine and which to let go, which images should be gathered and what to search for on the cover, and what to check for when you start editing for grammar. And when you start to doubt whether or not a certain page belongs in the issue, go back to your single-sentence description of the magazine. If the page supports the description, give it a polish. If it doesn’t, toss it out. That kind of focused decision-making can make your first draft a much more manageable magazine before you even begin to edit and design.