Loyola Marymount University Surfs Into the Future

DJ Stout has just completed a redesign of the alumni/university magazine of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Additionally, Stout and his team in the Austin office have redesigned and completely overhauled the magazine’s website and created an iPad app for the publication.

“There was a big emphasis on embracing the exciting new publishing technologies out there and getting them all to work together to create a more effective and vital piece of communication for the university,” says Stout. “The goal was to do those things in the print publication that print still does well and to do those things in the electronic space that those formats do well. The main idea was to leverage the strengths of all three mediums to make one really strong multitiered entity. I have to give the LMU folks a lot of credit for really jumping into the modern publishing world with both feet.”

The other big objective for Stout and his team was to get the publication to do a better job of communicating the unique identity of the Southern California university. Loyola Marymount is one of several Jesuit institutions in the country named for the Jesuit founder Saint Ignatius of Loyola. There is a Loyola University in Chicago, one in New Orleans and Loyola Marymount’s sister institution, Loyola Law School, has its own campus situated in downtown Los Angeles.

“There’s a lot of identity confusion because of the name,” says Stout, “and the university’s most visible piece of communication wasn’t doing a great job of branding the place.”

The first thing that Stout and his team did was change the name of the publication from the forgettable, and unspecific, title of Vistas to LMU Magazine. “All the big, well-known universities in California like USC and UCLA are known by their acronyms, so why not LMU too?” says Stout. “Then we stuck some surfers on the front cover and opened the book with a shot of a freeway overpass. There’s not a better way to say that THIS Loyola University is in Southern California than that.”

Stout emphasized big image driven features in the print publication and created areas in the magazine to make room for the use of larger art. “Alumni magazines, which only come out three or four times a year, are routinely clogged with old news that they feel obliged to cover and lots of press release type stories about former students and faculty winning scholarships and awards. Those are all worthy of mention in an alumni publication but they take up a lot of valuable real estate.”

A unique graphic device that resembles a horizontal timeline across the bottom of many of the pages was created to deal with past news and upcoming events, and notices about scholarships and awards were grouped together in small sidebars. These space-saving elements free up the spreads for more visually dynamic single page features with short copy blocks that the modern magazine browser is drawn to. Much of the traditionally text heavy content, like class notes and wedding/birth announcements and obituaries, are now delegated to the magazine’s electronic formats, freeing up the pages of the magazine for more engaging and entertaining content.

“My mantra with this magazine project, and actually all my publication redesigns is ‘Content is King!,’” says Stout, “Content can be both visual and literal but that doesn’t mean that it has to be long dense written stories.”

Many of the short copy elements in the new magazine are linked to additional online content and web exclusives, and even the table of contents in the new publication is a spread. One page is devoted to content in the print publication and the other is devoted to online content. LMU has caught the wave of modern publishing. Surf’s up, dude!