Back in university, whenever we had a few more advertisers for the student association magazine, we immediately went for more expensive paper, full colour, or sophisticated binding.

This is a bit like throwing fancy effects at a presentation. In both cases, it does not always work.

Very heavy rough paper works for wedding invitations, but on a magazine, it looks like a brochure for expensive wine fridges.

Heavy satin finish paper looks beautiful on a thick 100+ page, coffee table book, full of A4+-sized pages with lots of white space in it. Not so much for the A5-sized, loaded page with the calendar of the weekly drinks gatherings, plus 10 more pages.

In many cases, black and white photos with just one highlight colour makes things look much prettier than noisy images with random colour palettes.

Fancy is not always better.

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

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