Does Size Make a Difference or is it the Shape that Counts?

When looking at all those glossy magazines (you know, the real ones of importance -scrapbooking magazines ) I'm beginning to see a trend away from the glamourous 12x12 inch layouts. Magazines are now featuring many different sizes, if you count all those little accordion, or tag book things that appear, normally at the back of the magazines.

This is good news in one way - I have a drawer full of approximately £300 of different little (and empty) albums you can buy now. K& Co Life's Journey gatefolds (in leather cladding, with a lovely little hook thing), 7Gypsies accordian and otherwise spiral bound booklets, miscellaneous other brands of books and formats. All awaiting some kind of inspiration or motivation magic. They're just a bit nice, at the moment, to actually de-flower with my supposed artwork attempts.

Magazine size trends really don't suit me for real scrapbooking layouts (notice the "real" here - I seem to be proposing some kind of opinion that all those little mini-layouts in albums as described above, are not, in fact, "real"), as I'm proactively a 12x12 lady - more squarage for your acreage kinda thing. But then, how rarely do magazines feature the double layout anyway? Single layouts are a dime a dozen - and you probably won't see that many photos on them, which explains the big trend of the one-huge-photo-and-a-feeling-word layout.

Nowadays, magazines seem to like a lot of 8 1/2 x 11 inchs, and even feature double layouts in this format - they fit better on the glossy page. But even as a double, these A4 based pages don't make a square, but then non-square is "in" at the moment also.

Shapes must make a difference somehow - to be (square) or not to be (square), that is the question. And then there's another question - a rectangle in portrait or landscape orientation?. It must be a design problem for magazines - you certainly don't see that many 8 1/2 x 11 inch layouts pointed in the landscape position - that would take up one full width of a single glossy page (much as a single 12x12 would) but without the extra yardage for content.

It's content that sells, of course, ie. advertiser supplies - all those stickers, rub-ons, ribbons, fibres, acrylic doo-dads, and patterned papers that magazines want used to sell their advertising spots. Magazines don't make money out of their subscribers, and supposedly stay in business reliant upon their advertisers. In bed with sponsors, they want to see coverage of their products on the layouts published. Which looks good for larger sized layouts as still remaining the mainstay of magazines - I hope.

So, does size count? It seems like it nowadays. Does the shape count? Definitely. But don't tell my man around the house. He's just worked out my obsessive desire towards 13 inch minimum shelving. These requirements are to maintain my hobby of collecting large sheets of cardstock to eventually (for around 10% of the stockage anyway) end up in some kind of large, filled to spill-point photo album.