Content and design are two of the most important factors when determining the image of your future publication.

What is it going to look like?
What is the image we want to portray visually?
What is our agenda?
What do we want it to be about?
What image do we want portrayed when people read the publication?

If content is king – then design is queen. It’s the beauty that sets the content ablaze. Nothing sets me off more than to read a great story but the packaging looks like garbage. Unfortunately for the Christian media industry, this is the norm. They believe they have some great content (which, depending on the publication, can be questionable) but, more often than not, the package turns potential readers off.

This is another reason why Melissa and I started Rethink Monthly. We were tired of what we saw coming from the Christian media industry. Mediocre content – mixed with a questionable agenda – seasoned with crappy design, layout, and packaging. We were tired of the message being skewed by the vehicle it was being delivered in.

My thought is this: If you are already investing time and money and resources into this great content, then why not support the content with great design? More often than not, if your design doesn’t support the content, you’ll lose potential readers. And if you don’t have readers, then what good is the content after all?

But just as easily as you can miss the design mark, you can also shoot it to death – something I did early on in our journey in starting our publication.

Right off the bat I began scrutinizing every design detail regardless of how big or small the design feature was. I’d spend hours doing and re-doing different designs. I’d work and rework different images, fonts, and colors into the layouts, trying to perfect the ultimate publication. Not that it’s bad to rework designs and perfect them to your liking, but I was simply overdoing it. I was more concerned with design than content. Don’t get me wrong, we had a thorough process of checking our content and we liked what we were producing but I was letting the design dictate the content when I should’ve been letting the content dictate the design.

It took a few months of overworking myself and becoming less and less satisfied with the outcome, even though I was spending more than the appropriate time designing the layout. It took a while but soon I began to realize my mistake and now have taken more of an organic approach to the design – letting the content speak for itself and having the design come alongside in a more simplistic fashion.

Like I said before, content is king. But in order to have a successful publication, you need to allow the design of the publication to accentuate the content. It’s both-and not one or the other.