My favorite magazine is Monocle. In addition to the magazine, Monocle produces a great website, store – bricks and clicks - and podcasts (check out the Sunday ). One of the main draws to Monocle for me is the design. The lead designer went into great detail on his blog about the thinking and planning of the Monocle brand.

For those of you who are interested in the blurbs that stuck out to me (during this read of it), click the “more” link below. Otherwise, I HIGHLY recommend to head to the write-up and read the whole thing (warning: it’s a bit long, but SO worth it).

As I begin to tackle various projects of mine, I’ve already noticed myself re-reading this write-up for inspiration, tools and notes that I need to consider. This article touches on everything from company branding, web design and planning, workspace structure, video equipment and software, audio branding and strategy execution.

We wanted to make Monocle a journalism brand that you had a weekly relationship with via the internet, as well as the monthly relationship via the magazine.

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Many other players have clearly not thought enough about sound, even when they’re working from well-established brands with a deserved reputation for quality

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As you might expect, these keywords are not user-generated, but carefully chosen, curated and maintained. This retains a high quality threshold to the navigation, as a controlled vocabulary of keywords can be maintained by Monocle, and also reinforces the idea that Monocle is a bespoke, hand-finished production.

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In terms of user generated content, or user discussion of Monocle pieces, my view was that we didn’t need comments on the site as people increasingly have their own spaces to talk, discuss, comment – whether that’s blogs and discussion fora, or the social software of Facebook et al. So a more progressive approach would be to ensure that everything is linkable and kept online – with clean, permanent URL structures – thus encouraging people to point to articles from the comfort of their own sites.

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Creating the right office/studio environment was also key, in terms of careful functional layout, furniture and equipment, but also unwritten rules – no eating at desk, coats in the cloakroom not on the back of chair, finding frequent excuses for a glass of wine at the end of the day etc. – but that’s another story and one best told by Tyler

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I decided not to paginate, even for an article of this length, as I think serves no value to the user in the end – it makes it that much more difficult to print, and people know how to scroll.

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Setting titles as graphics certainly adds to the in-house workload, and may hamper search engines and malleability to some extent (we’re exploring Sifr as a replacement in the long run), but is compensated for by the coherent and distinctive experience it brings. The pages are Monocle, at-a-glance.

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Unusually, subscription to Monocle costs more than buying off the newsstand, but this is on the basis of this additional online editorial and functionality, as well as speedy delivery of the magazine to your door, before it hits newsstands

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As with many things Monocle, I inherited this sensibility of stripping back the design from the magazine/brand’s design team of Richard Spencer Powell and Ken Leung, pulling it back to the absolute core of its functional elements and brand identification.

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Advertising and sponsorship in particular was something we instinctively decided to reinvent. There was no way we were going to submit to the tyranny of the banner ad – it’s not a smart model, and certainly wouldn’t work with a bespoke premium brand.

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 Shifting ad agencies away from banner ads was a herculean task, but helped by the magazine’s examples of savvy advertorial or the in-issue manga supplement, which was a vehicle for product placement as well as narrative, as well as clever extensions of the character and style for Cartier, Toto, AmEx etc. Again, the value of a bespoke approach pays dividends, even it it’s a lot more work.

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Yet Monocle was also global in aspiration. It is a production that reaches out into the world for stories, a brand investing in global news and creating bureaux. These are important messages to reinforce. It had an immediately discernible, confident voice, as well as covering a unique set of subjects. It stands for quality. It’s shaken up a marketplace that had got a little lazy about many aspects of its operation, and that was the intention. More than that, with thousands of paying subscribers, it’s become a successful business.

Tags: branding, design, inspiration, monocle, tyler brule

Monocle Design was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 10:04 and is filed in Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.