I’m getting ready to move from Berlin to Weimar - my beloved small city of studying, home town of the Bauhaus, somewhere in the nowhere of Germany; where I haven’t lived for 18 months. I’m moving there for my last five months of my student time: for writing my master thesis. And in the process of packing and preparing for that, I found …an old issue of the Brand Eins magazine; one from October 2012! Which is great, because now I can do such an analysis I’ve already done for Fluter, the TIME Magazine and the Bloomberg Businessweek.
So on the graphic you can see on the top, there are three magazines: Two are section-based (about business) and two are theme-based. You have the Fluter with one - seemingly random - theme per issue, you have the Brand Eins with a business-focused theme per issue, and the Bloomberg Businessweek, that has no theme at all, but is about business.
The latter one is the one with the clearest structure: The Bloomberg Businessweek has six sections like “Global Economics”, “ETC.” or “Technology” and three feature stories about different topics. And this structure is the same every single week.
When we’re looking at structure, the other extreme is Fluter (the DUMMY magazine is similar): It has not structure at all. Only the Table of Content, the Editorial and the Imprint are parts of the magazine that you can find in each issue. The rest of the magazine is totally open to get filled with theme-based articles.
And then you have the best example of an theme-based magazine that I could find so far (or, let’s say, that I know the best so far): The Brand Eins magazine. You actually can see the structure of the magazine very clear in this abstract graphic. In the beginning of the magazine, the reader gets the known stuff: These double page starters are always the same. It’s about business people, brands, business history, numbers and graphics and balance sheets. So the reader gets slowly introduced to the topic of “business”. And only after that you come to the actually “theme” of this theme-based magazine with a lot of different articles. (In this case, the issue is about “specialists”. Brand Eins often covers topics that you wouldn’t link to the business world immediately. So the introduction to the business mindset on the first pages is even more important.) Then, the magazine closes quickly with just one more article that’s not theme-based, letters to the editor and the imprint.
I like the fluter as a theme-based magazine, but the Brand Eins is so much more clever in their structure. The structure itself says: “We tell you in the beginning that our magazine is about business, and then we let you see on one specific not-so-business-like topic from very different business-like perspectives”. Just wow. It’s defintely something I should consider copying for my own theme-based magazines.