Before picking a grid, positioning a headline, or swatching a palette, you should answer this question: What does the reader encounter first, and what comes later? Sections are what impose an internal order on your issue; they transform a loose collection of article ideas into a coherent reading path. This organization ensures that your cover, table of contents, feature spread, sidebars, visual pages, and closing pieces feel integrated, rather than like a scattered pile of individual items.
Think of sections as rooms within the same issue. One room presents the theme, another presents the main story, and another presents shorter pieces. Even a short magazine, like a sample eight-page issue, doesn’t have room for dozens of sections, but it should have well-defined roles. In this instance, you could have an opening section, a section for a main feature, and a section for supporting stories. And that may be enough structure to keep your issue from looking like a bunch of random, unconnected pages.
A helpful planning exercise is to organize your article ideas before doing any designing. Place each idea into one of three categories: opening, main, and supporting. An editor’s note, a table of contents, or a short article introducing your theme belongs in the opening section. The longest or most important article, the biggest interview, or the visual-heavy story goes into the main section. A small guide, resources page, photo captions, sidebars, or a closing note can fill out your issue without distracting from the cover story. This organization can tell you, early on, if an idea is too big, too small, or simply the wrong idea for the theme of your magazine.
Novice designers often assume that all the articles in an issue are equally important and should get the same amount of attention. It’s hard to write a rhythmic issue when you feel that every page is the main story. Your readers need to have moments when they encounter text-heavy and text-light pages, longer and shorter articles, text-oriented and image-oriented spreads. Organizing into sections tells you when you should slow down and when you should pick up the pace. It tells you where to use generous white space to give the eye a break. And it makes it much easier to organize your pages before you have invested so much time in detailed design.
Once you have established your sections, make those sections work for you when you design your pages. A main feature article requires an opening graphic, a headline, deck copy, body copy, and a pull quote. A supporting section might get shorter articles, shorter captions, smaller graphics, and more text in a sidebar format. A table of contents should match the names of your sections so your readers know what type of material lies behind the page. The page numbers, credits, and typefaces you repeat throughout the issue should also work in your favor so your readers feel they are on familiar ground.
Keep your section names simple and descriptive. Don’t call sections by witty names that your readers will not intuitively figure out. If your reader cannot tell if a section contains interviews, resources, feature articles, or short, visual-oriented articles, then the section name is working against your layout. Section names can also serve as the basis for your style sheet. When you know what your sections contain, you know what the opener should look like for your department and section pages, how your captions should be styled, and what typefaces work for your recurring content.
Before you import your article into your document of choice, read through your section plan as if it were the finished magazine. Does the order of the pages create interest? Does your longest, most substantial story show up at the right moment? Do you know what type of material you’re going to find in each section? Does the material in your section plan tie in with your theme? If your section plan is a coherent story on paper, it can serve as a good guide during your page-making process. Now, you can worry about grids, margins, image sizing, and type styles. You don’t have to carry the weight of structuring your issue as well.