







The West Australian had steadily been losing its appeal to higher-end and female readers. Our challenge was to create a new weekend magazine insert for the Saturday edition of the West Australian, that would showcase cutting-edge editorial, world-class photography and would attract prestige advertisers. All, of course, with a skeletal staff and tiny budget.
Working closely with the small editorial team, we developed a model for the magazine that would fulfil the editorial and design requirements, but be robust enough to allow easy construction week to week. The design depended on some strict style guidelines and the inventiveness of the editorial team to tell stories in a creative way with few resources. We provided ongoing coaching for art and design staff, photographers and illustrators, and Art Direction for multiple issues, working seamlessly with a team on the other side of the continent.
A blink. That's all it takes for a reader to decide whether it's worth the effort. And sadly, more and more readers are deciding it's not. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in Blink (a book that millions of people did read), we subconsciously use our life experience and perception to decide in an instant whether something is irresistible or boring. Our brains filter and make decisions based on visual and other sensual clues long before our conscious logic processes kick in. Most communication today fails because it is highly resistible. Our subconscious decides that it is inauthentic, dishonest or incompetent in a tiny fraction of the time it would take to read and analyse the whole thing. Read the rest of this entry »