Editorial Design: Creating a document that speaks to readers
Steph F. ~ A Brand Apart Design · Freelance Designer & Coffee Guzzler
A working designer walks through her real process on one real project, without ever opening a software tutorial by mistake.
Most editorial design classes teach the software. This one deliberately skips it, and that choice is both its clearest selling point and the source of most of its friction.
The course opens with a short survey of published work the instructor admires, magazines like Cereal and Another Escape, brand books like Helly Hansen's, and 99U Quarterly's typography-heavy spreads. It is not a deep analysis of any of them, more a mood-setting tour meant to prime the eye before the technical content starts. From there it moves into grids: real thirds, golden ratio layouts, column grids, and baseline grids, explained in plain terms and then demonstrated by overlaying guide lines on an existing magazine spread pulled from a stock marketplace. That overlay exercise, tracing a published page to figure out whether it's running a three-column or six-column structure and where the designer chose to break out of it, is the most transferable skill in the entire course. It gives a beginner a concrete method for reverse-engineering any layout they admire, rather than just being told grids are useful.
The process walkthrough
The back half of the course is built around a single project: a digital booklet about palm oil deforestation, designed from a blank InDesign document through to a finished, hyperlinked PDF. The instructor sets up a seven-column grid, drops in placeholder photos and real copy, and then works through a long, unscripted sequence of small decisions: switching from a landscape format to a square one because the copy balance felt off, converting a color-coded reference list into a table for consistency, building a repeating red corner motif to anchor floating text blocks, and using a fading blue overlay instead of green because it played better against the page above it. None of these are dramatic techniques, but they are honest ones, and watching a designer backtrack and rework a page that "just wasn't feeling right" is more instructive than a tidy demonstration would have been.
Where it falls short
The course is also loosely structured and light on production polish. The narration wanders, several points are repeated across chapters without adding new information, and the mood board and grid-theory chapters stay general rather than tying back concretely to design principles a beginner could apply elsewhere. The project timelapse, split into a fast cut and a slower narrated version, is the strongest teaching device in the class, but even there the commentary is more stream-of-consciousness than structured lesson. Anyone hoping for a breakdown of typography choices, color theory, or InDesign mechanics will not find one here. The final project brief mirrors the class structure well, asking students to draw grids over a magazine they like and document their own process, but it assumes a level of software comfort the course itself never builds.
As a first class from a working freelancer, it succeeds at showing genuine process rather than performing a tutorial. It is thin on theory and rough around the edges, but for a beginner who already has basic layout software skills and wants to see how professional layout decisions actually get made, page by page, it delivers something more useful than another grid explainer: a real, if messy, look at how a working designer thinks.
The standout
Watching the instructor overlay a grid on an existing magazine spread to reverse-engineer its column structure is the one technique worth the whole runtime.
What you will learn
- How to build a Pinterest mood board tied directly to the emotional content of a topic, not to competing publications
- How to identify and overlay grid systems (thirds, golden ratio, column grids, baseline grids) on existing published magazines
- How to choose an odd column count (seven or nine) to create asymmetrical, flexible layout options
- How to plan a document's format, page count, and print-multiples-of-four constraint before opening design software
- How to iterate a layout by placing real copy early and reworking backgrounds, tables, and image treatment through many small passes
- How to finish a document with hyperlinked sourcing and a printed or digital mockup for final review
Best for: A beginner designer who already knows their software basics and wants to see how a working freelancer actually thinks through layout decisions on a real project.
Skip it if: Anyone needing InDesign instruction, step-by-step technical tutorials, or a polished, tightly scripted lesson rather than a working designer's loosely narrated process.