Designing a magazine for the people who actually live there
There are lots of publications that describe themselves as local magazines. Over the years I've designed adverts for plenty of them on behalf of clients, and they usually follow a fairly familiar model. They're delivered across quite a wide area, they're funded by advertising and the editorial content sits amongst pages promoting local businesses.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's a commercial model that works for the publisher and gives businesses a way of reaching people in their area.
But for the last three years we've been involved with a rather different kind of local magazine.
Since Spring 2023, we've designed and printed the quarterly magazine for Parklands Residents' Association in Chichester. And when they say local, they really do mean local. The magazine isn't distributed across Chichester in the hope of building a bigger readership. It goes to the people who live in Parklands because those are precisely the people it's produced for.
That might sound like a fairly insignificant distinction, but looking back through the magazines we've produced, I think it's actually what makes the publication work.
Designing a magazine for the people who actually live there
Our first issue was Spring 2023, Issue 27 of the magazine and the first edition of what the Residents' Association described as its new-look publication. One of the features they wanted to introduce was Parklands People, celebrating interesting people who lived or worked within the community. The first was local resident and self-taught artist Ralph Apel, whose work had been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Ralph even created a variation of one of his artworks specifically for the front cover.
The intention for the magazine was clear from the beginning. Residents were encouraged to suggest people to feature, send in photographs and anecdotes, raise neighbourhood issues and help record some of the history of Parklands. Our job was to give all of that a structure.
That's an interesting design challenge because the material for a community magazine doesn't arrive as a beautifully curated collection of professional photography and perfectly edited copy. There are articles of different lengths, photographs from different sources, local notices, events, letters, adverts and inevitably stories that need two pages when you were rather hoping they'd fit onto one.
Each issue needs to look recognisably like Parklands, but the design also has to be flexible enough to accommodate whatever has happened in the community during the previous few months.
Looking through the issues we've produced since 2023 is actually rather like looking through a family album. We've had children's artwork from Parklands Community Primary School on the cover, followed later by a wonderful aerial photograph of the pupils and staff arranged into a huge number 50 for the school's 50th anniversary. We've featured local artists and sculptors, and in Summer 2025 the cover stars were the local refuse and recycling collectors, recognising people who quietly turn up every week and do one of those jobs most of us don't think about until it isn't done. The latest issue is different again, with the front cover remembering Basil Merritt, a long-standing resident and volunteer who had given a great deal of his time to the community.
When I put those covers next to each other, what strikes me isn't really the design. It's the people. And perhaps that's exactly how it should be.
The role of graphic design in a publication like this isn't to shout louder than the content. It's to organise it, make it accessible and enjoyable to read, give it consistency and allow all those different stories to sit comfortably together.
There are adverts in the magazine, of course. They help support it and introduce residents to businesses and services that may be useful to them. But the editorial isn't there simply to fill the spaces between the adverts. It's the reason the magazine exists.
The latest issue contains stories about the Open Garden Days raising money for improvements within Parklands, volunteers looking after Centurion Way, the Great Parklands Garage Sale, the new fete and dog show, community notices and details of what's happening locally. None of those stories would mean very much to someone reading the magazine fifty miles away. They don't need to. They're interesting if you live in Parklands.
I think that's something we sometimes forget when we're designing anything, not just magazines. We can become very concerned about making something impressive, clever or fashionable when the first question should probably be much simpler. Who is this actually for?
Parklands magazine knows exactly who it's for
It doesn't need to appeal to the whole of Chichester. It doesn't need a huge circulation or thousands of people reading it online. Every quarter it simply needs to arrive through the letterboxes of people living in that particular community and tell them what's been happening around them, what's coming up next and occasionally introduce them to somebody living a few streets away who they might never otherwise have known about.
After designing and printing fourteen issues, I've realised we've also inadvertently helped create something else. A little piece of social history. Taken individually, an article about an open garden, some new trees, a school anniversary, a garage sale or the people who empty the bins might not seem historically important. Put those stories together, issue after issue and year after year, and they create a record of a place and the people who lived there.
In twenty years' time somebody could pick up one of these magazines and see what Parklands was talking about in 2023, 2024, 2025 or 2026. They'll see the things residents were concerned about, the events they enjoyed, the changes happening around them and some of the people who quietly helped make their community what it was.
I'm proud to be a small part of that story.
