All companies long for meaningful connections — with existing customers, prospects, and employees. And storytelling is the surest path to human connection, no matter the format.
But not all formats are created equal.
A magazine is a tried-and-true storytelling medium with staying power. It conveys authority and authenticity while quieting the digital noise. If you can capture someone’s attention with a high-quality magazine, you’re likely to keep it — achieving that coveted connection.
Perhaps you’ve considered a brand magazine as part of your communications strategy. Maybe you’ve floated the idea with your in-house marketing team or your creative agency. It’s entirely possible that one or both have said, “Sure, we can do that.”
At the risk of sounding immodest, we’d like to suggest that if you’re serious about a custom publication, you should entrust it to people who know and love magazines. Here’s why.
Magazine people obsess over audience.
The measure of any great magazine must include a demonstrated understanding of the audience. That reader-first mindset is how editors and art directors develop stories that achieve the emotional and intellectual resonance required to move people.
Your audience is the beating heart of your editorial strategy — or, as we like to call it, “the blueprint.” To create the blueprint for your custom publication, we first get smart about your readers and why you’re uniquely positioned to serve them based on who you are and what you offer. With your input, we determine where your expertise and your readers’ interests intersect and how you can trade your knowledge for their engagement.
This collaborative exercise leads us to an editorial and design vision that complements — and extends — your brand in a way that inspires trust with your audience and supports your marketing and communications agenda.
Editors and designers are partners in excellence.
Not unlike tacos and Tuesdays, editorial and design are inextricably linked. Experience tells us that editors must think like designers — and vice versa — to capture someone’s attention and hold onto it until the last word.
Ours is a highly collaborative craft, requiring everyone, regardless of job title or creative role, to commit fully to the reader experience — from the brainstorming of ideas to the shaping of each story to the art direction and design of each magazine spread. Every opinion is valued when offered in service of the reader.
We are joined in this endeavor by a network of accomplished reporters, writers, photographers, illustrators, and other artists who are as passionate about this work as we are — and whose expertise spans industries. And we invite you into the process at every juncture, to harness your perspective and insight.
Making magazines requires a specialized skillset.
Not to minimize the very real talent of our creative brethren — in-house or agency — who crush it on advertising campaigns and other pithy promotional pursuits, a magazine is a complex, long-form medium designed to enthrall, with its own set of requirements and standards.
Writers understand how to extract information from sources and weave together a compelling narrative. Art directors read those manuscripts and conceptualize the visuals that both support the story and engage the reader. Editors not only help writers with the words, but they also partner with designers to package each story in a way that will entice someone to stop, skim, then dig in.
Magazines also have their own language. Is it a staff box or masthead? Subhead or deck? Strapline or slug? Callout or pull quote? Even we have a cheat sheet.
We work with a lot of clients who previously produced their brand magazines in-house, which can put undue pressure on creative teams called upon to execute on, well, everything. A custom publication is an obvious place to outsource, because there are people like us who live for this type of work — and love to apply our expertise to your business. And your creative colleagues will thank you for it.
The nuts and bolts are just as important.
Based on years of experience publishing — and consuming — magazines, we know that how the book feels in your hands can be just as important as the content inside when it comes to establishing credibility with your audience. That’s why we are just as persnickety about picking paper stock and printers as we are about hiring writers and photographers.
Our art and production departments understand everything required to prepare press-ready files, and they know exactly what to look for during final checks. You can also take comfort in knowing that due to decades in this business, we have longstanding relationships with the country’s best printers, who help us — and, by extension, you — balance quality with price.
Striving for better is always better.
Even people at the top of their game know there’s room for improvement. We take great pride in our work — that is, your work — so we fine-tune constantly. Our team conducts introspective postmortems after the completion of every publication to pinpoint areas for even the smallest enhancements in workflow, editorial, or design, with the intent of better serving your audience. Taking a fresh look after the production frenzy subsides has a way of revealing those opportunities.
Ideally, we have those post-printing conversations with you too, so the next issue is even better than the last, both in terms of quality and effectiveness. Together we’ve worked hard to earn your readers’ trust, and continual refinement is how you keep it.
And now for the shameless plug.
Trust in a storied legacy.
D Magazine Partners, our parent company, celebrated 50 years of award-winning journalism in 2024 — meaning readers have trusted the D family of publications for half a century. Since 2001, clients have trusted D Custom with their brand stories, starting with Texas Aggie, our first and longest-standing partnership.
With those deep roots in magazine publishing come editorial excellence, design distinction, and audience obsession — all put to work for the benefit of your brand. You also gain access to an extensive network of award-winning writers, reporters, photographers, illustrators, and other artists — many of whom, like us, have made magazines their life’s work.