Magazine design: Our approach to Colmore Life

Author: Stacey BarnfieldPublished:

Proud faces all around at Edwin Ellis as the first edition of Colmore Life magazine designed and produced by yours truly is distributed across Colmore Business District, the commercial heart of Birmingham city centre.

We won a competitive tender to redesign and restructure the magazine on behalf of Colmore BID, one of the UK’s most successful Business Improvement Districts, which recently began its third term championing the area.

Our approach to the magazine was to reflect the changing nature of the District. Not only is this an area well known for housing the UK headquarters of some of the world’s most famous professional and financial services companies, but now has an emerging food, drink and independents scene. It’s fast becoming a destination in its own right.

The front-page design features a quartered montage of bright, bold images, shaped to mirror the circular design of the Colmore BID logo, perfect for the summer edition.

Magazine design news pages

Colmore Life magazine’s news pages have been called The Lowdown

Editorial structure and articles are shaped to raise the profile of BID businesses, particularly in the new Movers & Shakers, Lowdown, People & Places and Property sections.

Elsewhere, food and drink is given prominence with recipes, restaurant news and four pages given over to the forthcoming Colmore Food Festival; one of the highlights in the Colmore BID calendar as it attracts more than 30,000 visitors each year.

We’ve also sourced three fantastic dining offers at Hotel du Vin, the Pint Shop and Wayland’s Yard.

The rich past of the Business District is also featured with a regular History & Heritage page.

We’ve gone for a contemporary serif typeface to use on news and features pages, to sit alongside the BID brand sans type. They complement each other really well.

Our thanks once again go to Colmore BID for giving us the opportunity to work on Colmore Life and we can’t wait to get stuck into the next edition.