Job Crossover

This week at my job, I had the opportunity of going over nearly a dozen different magazines. I have never worked for a magazine publisher but I have worked for a place that did textbook layout and design and I am prone to believe that the two fields are similar in some ways. As I was trying to judge which magazine was one of "the best" for the field, I was surprised by what I found. A well known, well respected magazine had blatant errors and it just didn't look professional to me. I started to give my review and then took a step back realizing that I may in fact need a second opinion.

At the textbook job, we had to layout the pages by spread, two pages side by side. Those two pages had to bottom align. The last line of text on both pages had to line up with each other. We had strict specifications on how much space was above and below headings, how many stacked words you could have at the beginning or end of lines, and even how many letters could appear before and after the hyphen of a wrapped word. We had sheets of information for each job we did and we referenced them on almost an hourly basis, or at least I did, some of my other coworkers had better memories. I gained an attention to detail when it comes to layout because of this job.

So, back to the magazine's blatant errors. I was really frustrated by the page numbers in the footer. I always thought it was common practice that the page number is consistently placed (either in the header or footer, I don't care, so long as it is consistent) on a page, especially if it is in a footer. I can accept the fact that ads don't get footers and I can also accept that occasionally a picture will bleed off the edge and there is no footer, but for the rest of the magazine there should be page numbers. Am I right? How else are you suppose to find the article on page 124? This magazine moved the footer, changed the style of page numbers, and would just leave it off when they seemed to feel like it. I couldn't believe it. The other magazines got it just fine. Why couldn't this one do it? I now know what raises my hackles when looking through periodicals, footers, who would have guessed I would have a "foot fetish."