You’ve got an amazing cover, detailed description and your mag title is flawless. What else can you do to spice things up and give your profile a personal touch? The difference between just flipping articles and curation is an awareness of what’s in a collection and how it’s presented.
Adding articles in real time is useful for news or timely subjects, like holidays. But with evergreen content or things that are perpetually relevant and fresh, you have a little more flexibility.
Think about chronology
Think about your topic and how its information can be organized. Besides the publishing date of an article, you can find other ways to piece a story or theme together. You can do this before you start a new magazine or even evaluate an older one. First, you’ll need to log in to editor.flipboard.com to get started. If you are arranging articles or other magazines like a directory, you can make them alphabetical:
If you’re recounting a historical event, chronological articles can show progression. Conversely, reverse chronology can act as a countdown or reveal an origin story.
Break it up
Do you love lists? Take any listicle and break it up into individual items to flip by finding the original sources or adding your own. You can also add items you would have put in if you had written the list.
Consider the images that are shared with each flip; sometimes you can sort them by colors of the rainbow, pattern or texture.
Organize your covers
Skinning or theming your magazines as a collection is a cool way to keep up with trends. Changing all the covers to match each other can create “tile art,” send a message, support a cause or make someone smile. To honor Black History Month, Flipboard employee Christel changed all of her magazine covers to fit the theme:
Mag covers can also work together. Take a look at your profile and examine the connections between your interests and most active magazines. Do they have a relationship in any way?
Check out this inside joke for anyone who enjoyed Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show:
Add enhancements, like products or music
If you have an online shop, your magazine can act as a catalog. You can choose to organize items by price, color or season.
It can also help to move sale items to the front, so more people will see them when they enter your magazine.
Music can be a wonderful backdrop to your magazine experience. Thankfully, SoundCloud links are playable within magazines.
Whatever changes you make to your mags, make sure to let people know on your social networks so they can see what you’ve done.
What are other cool ways to organize your magazines? If you see a great example, send a screenshot to @FlipboardMag on Twitter.
~jdlv is browsing “Color Theory”