210: From Vision to Print: The Birth of Pattern Magazine

See the show notes for this Episode here.

This transcript has been automatically generated.

Bonnie Christine:
Hey there.

Bonnie Christine:
Welcome to the Professional Creative. Let me tell you something wild. We created a Magazine, a real 120 page quarterly print publication called Pattern. And today I want to take you behind the scenes of exactly how we did it because this was quite the project. Not only was it a project though, it was a bet. It was a bet that we are willing to take on paper, on permanence, on something really tangible that you can hold in your hands. In a world that feels like we're scrolling and swiping and going through rapid fire content, we wanted to create something that really invites you to slow down.

Bonnie Christine:
To maybe pour some tea and to.

Bonnie Christine:
Curl up on the porch to read. And not just to skim, but to feel the weight of the page and the texture of the ink. This magazine is our love letter to analog and to print and to the creative humans who make art that really lives beyond the screen. And I believe deep in my bones that print still holds so much power. Now don't get me wrong, this is not an anti tech move. We love our tools and our automations, but we are also making a deliberate choice to match the rise in technology with something that feels really rooted and human and tangible. And I think that that is what makes this moment so incredibly exciting.

Bonnie Christine:
I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creat, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing.

Bonnie Christine:
The most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to.

Bonnie Christine:
Become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today, I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

Bonnie Christine:
So I've been doing a lot of research on kind of the print industry and what's happening right now and the printing market size. It's supposed to see steady growth and it already has been. So in 2024 it was a $340 billion business. This year it's 360 and it's supposed to grow to 423 by 2029. That's a compound annual growth of 4.5%. So while everything else is kind of moving faster and becoming more digital, print is quietly holding its ground and the demand is growing. We often talk about what's trending, but we don't really talk about maybe why. And if you ask me, this return to analog is really about how people feel.

Bonnie Christine:
There was a recent study called the Harris Poll that caught my attention. It said that print isn't dead. 71% of consumers say that print catalogs or magazines feel more authentic than digital campaigns. And 65% of them look forward to receiving them from brands that they love. And this part really made me stop and Nod. Tactile matters. 66% of consumers say that touching and physically interacting with products is the most enjoyable part of, of in person shopping. There's something about that tactile element that really draws us in.

Bonnie Christine:
It makes us linger a little longer. So I know that this is true for me. When I get a beautiful magazine or catalog in the mail, it creates this whole moment for me. You know, I like put it aside until I have just the right moment. And I'll typically fix either a latte if it's earlier in the day or tea if it's later in the day. And I will curl up on the sofa or outside in the hammock and just enjoy, like become one with this paper thing in my hands. And it's just this invitation to kind of enter a different world, but escape screens for a minute. And that's what we're really feeling over here as well.

Bonnie Christine:
People are longing for something real, for something slower, for something incredibly human because tactile and analog experiences, they offer what digital just can't replicate. It's increased trust, it's deeper emotional connection, and it's greater longevity. Pattern Magazine was built to be on your studio table for years to come. It's so incredibly in the moment and also evergreen all at the same time. And that's the bet that we're making. And that brings us to today. If you have ever dreamed of launching your own magazine or a workbook, or any printed collection of your own, this episode is going to be really helpful for you. To walk you through exactly how we made it happen step by step.

Bonnie Christine:
And I'm going to share all the tools, the timelines, and the decisions that we made along the way. And yes, I have a freebie for you too. But I'll tell you more about it in just a minute. A few years ago, I scribbled down in my notebook, create a magazine for surface designers. And at the time it felt super far off like a total someday dream. I tucked it away, but it kept bubbling up louder and clearer until one day we knew that it was time. And this was just over a year ago. So we were in a team gathering and we're like, I think it's time to do it.

Bonnie Christine:
We're going to do it. We're making a magazine. Our first internal meeting was simple, but man, was it electric. We opened up three documents, A spreadsheet to map out the flow of the issue, a production timeline, and a theme overview to guide the vision. And that was really it. That was the first tiny step that we were taking on this big, unknowing journey. We had no publishing background, we had no warehouse, we had no team of editors. But we did have a clear vision, a small but mighty team, and a real willingness to figure it out one step at a time.

Bonnie Christine:
We imagined patterns sitting on messy studio tables, splattered with paint and dog eared and full of sticky notes and highlights. We wanted it to be real and also incredibly helpful for people who read it. When I first saw the box of printed magazines, after all of these years and then all of the hard work, specifically in the last year, I cried. I couldn't help but have tears in my eyes because I was holding a copy in my hands. I handed one to my mom. I watched David flip through the pages. I handed one to my best friend Callie, who had done the majority of the photography for the magazine. She cried and everyone just felt still and deeply connected to something real and so incredibly proud job.

Bonnie Christine:
Then came the time to show it to our community. And the first time we did this, it was at the licensing expo. We debuted this magazine there on the floor and we just saw hundreds, maybe thousands of people grab the magazine and start flipping through the pages. And their face just really said it all, like, this is beautiful. This feels like something that matters. And we knew that we had created something that wasn't just pretty, but it was really, really meaningful. As one of our contributors, Helen Deeltre, said, in our follower count obsessed world, being featured in a magazine feels so much more meaningful to me. Maybe it's because someone took the time to curate it, to choose to say, this work matters enough to put it on paper and that is what print can really do.

Bonnie Christine:
Okay, so I teased this freebie. If today's episode is stirring up ideas for your own printed piece, I want to make sure that you feel supported. So I put together something and we're calling it the Printing Inquiry Email template and vendor list. So inside this freebie, you're going to find the exact email that we sent to our printers that we were researching and trying to figure out who we were going to go with. And I'm also giving you the curated list of all of the vendors that we reached out to so that you can save this huge endeavor of research yourself. Okay, so that is over in today's show notes. You can go to professionalcreative.com to grab it. So here's the truth.

Bonnie Christine:
We had no idea how to make a magazine when we started. None of us had worked in publishing. None of us knew how to lay out pages for print. For none of us knew how to find a printer or what it was going to cost to ship around the world. So we just started to ask a lot of questions. And for every answer, we had three more questions. There were, for sure, moments of overwhelm. There were moments of doubt, and there was also that kind of creeping question like, are we doing the right thing? Is anyone going to actually want this? But here's what we discovered.

Bonnie Christine:
We don't have to know it all to begin, and we just need to care about the project deeply and be willing to learn and ask questions along the way. And so that's what we did. Because when you take the leap, when you bring your ideas off of screen and into someone's hands, you create a kind of connection we've already covered. Print is far from dead. In fact, it is on the rise, slowly and soulfully, as a counterbalance to the fast and the digital. And you get to be a part of that moment. So I want to walk you through kind of the framework that we use to bring Pattern magazine to life. This is the roadmap that I wish that we had when we were just starting.

Bonnie Christine:
So this simple, clear, and built for a creative like you. There were eight key stages that we worked through. The first one was all about the vision. Before we created a single page, before we even knew how to make a magazine, we sat down and asked, why are we doing this? Who is this for? And what do we want people to feel as they flip through each page? Now that clarity became our compass for the rest of the project. For us, this vision was really clear. A quarterly magazine specific to the surface design industry. Something that felt both strategic but full of soul. A blend of expert business guidance and inspiration that you could dog ear and mark up and keep beside you in the studio.

Bonnie Christine:
And that feeling guided everything else. So your first step is to really just capture what's in your heart on paper. What is the purpose of this Print piece that you're looking to bring to life. Who are you creating it for and what should it feel like in someone's hands? Now, once you have that, you've got to start kind of gathering some visuals. So maybe you pull together a mood board or other types of magazines that you love and think about why you love them. This is going to anchor your direction and help you make decisions from a place of a solid foundation. Stage number two was to map out the flow of the content. So once you kind of have that vision, you want to build in structure to the issue.

Bonnie Christine:
So we created a spreadsheet that mapped out the entire flow cover to cover. So it was a bit of a bird's eye view. So we weren't naming articles or writing the articles, but we were asking, what kind of content do we want to include? Will it be divided, divided into sections? What topics are going to feel essential? What topics are going to recur magazine after magazine? And will some articles be written by us? Are we going to have guest contributors? For Pattern, we landed on four distinct sections. Section one is Patterns of Living and Lifestyle. Section two is Patterns of Business and Strategy. Section three is Patterns of Productivity and Creation. And section four is Patterns in Motion, which is all about kind of engagement and community. So if you think about that, we were really strategic in those four sections, meaning the first one is deeply inspiring.

Bonnie Christine:
The second one is kind of heady. It's a lot of information, It's a lot of detailed help with your business and strategy. Then section number three, Patterns in Motion, is like, okay, now how are we going to actually get this done? It's kind of like time management and annual planning and really like putting this kind of big, heady section to work. And then section four is all about community. So you kind of leave on this up note. So we don't want to overwhelm you or overload you. We want to move you through this magazine as an experience. You get excited, you learn, you might get a little overwhelmed.

Bonnie Christine:
Then you move into like, okay, well, this is how I'm actually going to make that happen. And then you leave on this, like, deeply connected note. So every magazine is going to flow through those four sections. And that was really important for us to nail really early on. So for you, you can take a moment and think, like, what sections make sense for you? Maybe you want to explore something seasonal or like creative rituals or something that you want to do over and over again. Maybe you want to also kind of create this experience that if you were to read your publication Cover to cover, someone would go through the next stage. Number three is to create editorial guidelines. Once we knew the content that we wanted, it was time to set expectations for ourselves and for our contributors.

Bonnie Christine:
So we created a simple editorial guideline, just a PDF that outlined word counts and tone of voice, where each piece would live in the magazine and the deadlines, and how to submit both writing and images, and that kind of thing. So we also included technical specs like photo resolution and color profile and formatting to make sure that every piece looked cohesive once it went to print. Our photo requests tests were simple and they were direct. We asked for high resolution original images formatted in CMYK at 300dpi. Photos needed to be clear and well lit. They needed to own the permission to publish those images. We wanted photographer credits. So by submitting, contributors also granted us permission to share their images across print, digital and social.

Bonnie Christine:
And that's just a way for us to extend that reach and showcase their work beautifully and with integrity. So just this one document eliminated a bunch of back and forth. It helped our contributors feel confident, made our editorial process so much smoother. So if you are writing with guest writers or artists, this step is really important, giving them guidelines to follow even if you're doing it all yourself. Guidelines for yourself are really important as well, so that you can stay consistent. Stage four was to budget and plan expenses. So we got to talk about the money. This part can feel overwhelming, but it is manageable.

Bonnie Christine:
We built a budget that included everything. We asked ourselves a few guidelines. What can we diy? What needs to be outsourced, what's our print quantity and what are we charging? So let's walk through what our printing costs look like. For the first edition of Pattern magazine, we printed 6,000 copies. Now the page count is four covers, pages 116 interior pages, plus four perforated pages at the back. This is really fun. I don't know if many people know this, but at the back of the magazine there are four pages that are perforated for you to tear out and use on your mood boards. The magazine is perfect bound.

Bonnie Christine:
It is printed on 70 pound matte text paper. The cover is 100lb soft touch matte. The final four pages that are perforated are printed on 80 pound finch opaque text paper with that perforation near the spine for easy tear out. So our total print invoice was $28,717.88. Of that, the magazine themselves were just around 24,500 which covered the original order plus an additional 1,000 copies that we added later. Then we had to get them from the printer to someone else, right? So shipping in Freight was $710 to ship 1,000 magazines to Las Vegas, which is where we were going to debut the magazine at the licensing expo. And then it was 455 to ship all of our additional copies to our 3PL. So we also have to pay to store them at our 3PL.

Bonnie Christine:
So our 3PL, that's third party logistics partner, they charge us $45 per skid per month. And so one skid fits around 2,000 magazines. So that part is really affordable. So one thing that I thought was really interesting as is with everything, the more copies we printed, the bigger price break we got, right? So I was eager to kind of wrap my mind around how many we were going to print. So for instance, if we ordered 1,000 copies, it was going to roughly be $13 per magazine. If we ordered 6,000 copies, it would roughly be $4 per magazine. And it continues to go down the more you print. So it's a really big difference.

Bonnie Christine:
And when you're balancing kind of quality with budget, seeing that cost per piece really helps you make clear strategic decisions. But you also don't want to end up with thousands of unsold magazines. So it's tricky. If you are just starting, I recommend keeping it simple. You can use a spreadsheet, you can start plugging in some rough estimates, and if you're not sure about cost, that's okay, you can just leave space to fill them in. Once you get quotes from printers, Remember, the freebie for today is the whole list of printers that we reached out to and the email that we sent them to start getting information. The point here is to begin where you are. A thoughtful budget builds confidence and it's going to help you make decisions from a place of, you know, knowledge.

Bonnie Christine:
If you're a surface designer with big.

Bonnie Christine:
Dreams, but maybe feel stuck spinning your wheels, listen up. You've done the courses, you're building the portfolio. But when it comes to licensing your work and growing a business that pays, you keep hitting the same wall. Too many tasks, not enough traction, not.

Bonnie Christine:
Sure where to go next. I created PatternPlus to change that.

Bonnie Christine:
PatternPlus is my membership built specifically for surface pattern designers. Whether you're just getting started or already licensing your work, no matter what program you use, Illustrator, Procreate, Photoshop, or even just your sketchbook, PatternPlus gives you the structure and clarity to create consistently, pitch confidently and grow a licensing ready business. Each month you'll get time saving tools.

Bonnie Christine:
Like two beautiful product mockups, a professional.

Bonnie Christine:
Business template, and the done for you social studio that's packed with 20 caption prompts, trend insights and key dates. You'll also get on demand group coaching with me and a quarterly trend report to keep you ahead of what's working in the industry. But here's my favorite part. Every month you get a real licensing opportunity with a creative brief from an actual dream company looking to license your work. These are the kinds of brand partnerships that can change everything for just $47 a month. PatternPlus is like a time machine for your creative career. It's designed to save you 15 to 20 hours every single month so that you can focus on what you left most making art and getting it into the world. If you're ready to gain momentum and have a streamlined workflow that opens licensing doors, this is your next step.

Bonnie Christine:
Head over to bonniechristine.com/PatternPlus to join today. That's spelled out PatternPlus P L U S PatternPlus is the membership that I honestly wish I had at the beginning and also still today. From my earliest efforts to today's full time career. And I'm so excited to share it with you.

Bonnie Christine:
So the next stage was to choose the right printer. Now this step can make or break your final product. So we wanted to take our time. We wanted to ask good questions and get into the details. We reached out to a whole bunch of printers when we first got started. My team, specifically Tessie, started sending emails to get specs and she kept track of everything in a spreadsheet with quotes and timelines, shipping options, fulfillment capabilities and any notes. Here's what might surprise you. Only one of those companies actually reached out to meet with us personally over Zoom.

Bonnie Christine:
We assumed they'd be the most expensive actually because they I, I knew that they printed this other magazine that Love that's really luxurious, but they weren't. In fact, they ended up being the easiest to work with, had competitive pricing and they were willing to work with with our pretty short timeline. So if you want to know who we're working with, you got to go grab the freebie from today's episode. Again, that's over at professionalcreative.com so as we were reaching out we were getting quotes really all over the place. We were getting quotes from $4 a magazine to upwards of like $24 a magazine. Production time ranged from five weeks to five days and shipping time ranged from 14 days to four days. So you want to just Just get really clear, ask a bunch of questions, ask to see samples, ask to speak with someone on the team, notice how they communicate. You want to make sure that you go with one that feels really aligned.

Bonnie Christine:
And again, today's freebie is going to help you with that. So stage number six was to start collaborating with contributors. If you are including guest writers or artists, the stage is where all of that really gets brought together. We hosted a vision meeting with our internal team to align on the tone, the message, the experience that we wanted and who we wanted to first reach out to to contribute in our debut issue. And so throughout that entire process, we stayed in close communication. We wanted to create this guest contributor experience. We wanted them to feel honored to have their work in print. We wanted to honor their story, their imagery.

Bonnie Christine:
We also wanted to really make it feel very special. So once it was all said and done, I write a handwritten thank you note, because I think that's a really deeply human thing to do. And we also sent them, like a little something in the mail, a gift with a copy of the magazine. So we always kind of change up the gifts that we send for thank yous. But we've done everything from dried flower bouquets to garden aprons to fresh flower arrangements, even the occasional house plant. Next up was stage seven, which was to design for print. Now, designing for print is a different world, and thank goodness for Rebecca, our lead designer, who was the lead on this entire project. Margins, bleeds, spreads, color profiles.

Bonnie Christine:
They all behave kind of differently when ink touches paper. So every detail matters. When we began designing Pattern magazine, our lead designer, Rebecca, she started by creating kind of this design direction PDF. This is the visual guide that sets the tone, the color palette, the overall aesthetic. And so this is like five to seven pages long, and it includes kind of just the general design elements, the inspiration, so that everyone can get aligned and give it. Give it a big green check before she moves into actually designing the pages. So from there, we kind of review it, we make adjustments, and then we give it a big thumbs up, up. And then typically, I book a photo shoot with Callie, my photographer, and so we can really flood the issue with fresh imagery.

Bonnie Christine:
We created magazine templates directly in InDesign, and that makes it super easy to collaborate and make notes and adjust the issue as you move along and finalize layouts as you go. One of the things that I've learned is that a clear design direction is just going to make everything run so much smoother. It's going to reduce the back and forth and reduce the edit time. So before you dive into layout, you ought to start with a handful of kind of general design templates that you mix and match as you go. You can start kind of compiling these from magazines that you already own and that you love. When designing for print, you have to focus on kind of those principles of good design. Contrast, movement, rhythm. In a print piece, legibility and hierarchy are especially important.

Bonnie Christine:
Think of your pages in three layers of interaction. Kind of that quick flip through so can someone glance and understand the story quickly? And then that curious kind of skimmer, right? So are titles and pull quotes engaging enough to draw someone in? And then the cozy deep dive. Will they want to curl up with a cup of tea and read every word? Print offers this highly tactile, immersive experience. But that also means it's easy to over design. So be sure to leave space to breathe. We used a mix of image heavy spreads and text heavy pages to create a lot of balance and variety. So think of it as this visual rhythm like moments of pause and moments of movements, moments of pause and moments of movement. And that is where you really lock everything in.

Bonnie Christine:
Next, we actually print it. It print it on paper before we send it to print. Even like at an at home printer, something that looks good on screen is always going to feel different when it's on paper and in your hands. So this is just like a quick test, but it helps you think about legibility and spacing and flow in a completely different way. So if you print it on paper, you will always go back and make adjustments in the digital space. It just, just something about that always seems to happen. So we reviewed both our digital proofs and physical samples before we gave a final yes. If you are designing it yourself, I recommend starting in indesign or hiring someone who specializes in print layout.

Bonnie Christine:
It is worth the investment to really get that part right. Finally, stage eight. Oh my goodness. Is launching the magazine. This is where we bring it to life. This is the moment when all of the planning and designing and dreaming it all comes together in your magazine or whatever it is, it makes its way into the hands of your readers. When it came to Pattern Magazine, we began by asking questions again. So do we want to fulfill this in house or outsource it? What's our scale? How many magazines are we shipping? Are we shipping it only domestically or worldwide? Side note, we're shipping worldwide.

Bonnie Christine:
And would A3PL, our third party logistics provider, help us serve our customers better? So we ultimately chose to use our three plus it is a team that we already know and love from working with our Flowery shop. They customize our fulfillment process really well. And when it comes to shipping, we wanted to work closely with them to make it really thoughtful. Then of course we had to decide how we were selling it. So we added it to our shop in Shopify. Shopify is so flexible when it comes to physical products. And so we have distributed Pattern in a handful of ways. The first is right inside our Pattern plus membership.

Bonnie Christine:
Pattern Magazine is really deeply related to our Pattern plus membership. It's kind of one in the same Pattern magazine gives you a taste of it and invites you to come in deeper to Pattern plus if you want. So we always start there with the magazine. The next is in our flowery shop, our e commerce shop, and then the third is at in person events like the Licensing Expo. So throughout this launch, we really focused on how we told the story of the magazine. We built excitement through email and Instagram and podcast sneak peeks. We made it an experience for our readers and our audience. And that's what I want to encourage you to do as well.

Bonnie Christine:
The story of the thing that you're doing, it matters so much. So invite people into your process and why you do what you do. So that was our process. It was not fast, it was not simple, but it was really special. And we are working to refine it. We are almost about to send our second issue to print and we are working on articles for the third issue, which will be Q1 in 2026. So it is something to really project manage. You want to get ahead of it.

Bonnie Christine:
So no one person is feeling rushed to finalize articles or the design or the printing. And so it's something to really work. But it's been really, really beautiful when you hold that finished piece that you've worked so hard on in your hands, especially after it's been months of effort and love, it's like really an incredible feeling. So if you take one thing away from today's episode, I want it to be this. You don't need permission. You don't need someone to tell you it's time. You don't need to be perfect. You are allowed to bring your vision to life when you're ready, when you feel ready to do it.

Bonnie Christine:
And I know how vulnerable that feels. It takes practice and heart to put something together and then birth it into the world and see what people think of it. Especially when it's print, it feels final and permanent and maybe exposed. But it's also what makes it powerful. You are by way of doing that, creating legacy. And you're honoring your vision and your voice and you're putting beauty into the the world that can't just be swiped away. So take a deep breath. You are so ready to bring whatever it is that you want to bring to life.

Bonnie Christine:
To life. And if you are longing for something analog, come join us and and try to kind of catch wind of this tactile movement that we are so very thoroughly taking a bet on. Today we pulled back the curtain on one of our most meaningful projects to date, Pattern Magazine. If you want to dive into Pattern Magazine, I'd love to invite you to do that. You can visit bonniechristine.com/patternmagazine and get an issue there or subscribe to the quarterly annual subscription. The magazine is $22 and we ship it all over the world. We also talked about what it means to just make a bet on beauty, on slowness, on paper, on permanence. I walked you through my eight stage roadmap for bringing this print piece to life.

Bonnie Christine:
How it started, vision. Then we structured the content, how we collaborated with contributors, how we communicated clearly how to budget, design, print, promote something that you're really proud of, and how to launch from fulfillment and shipping to pricing and marketing in a way that invites people into your story. We also talked about a lot of common fears when doing something like this. I think we want to wait to feel qualified or we want to wait until. I don't know, it's easy, but it.

Bonnie Christine:
Doesn'T have to be.

Bonnie Christine:
You just have to be ready to bring it to life. Don't forget to download your free guide. It is the template and the vendor list that we used to bring this project to life. You can go grab it at ProfessionalCreative.com that is going to include the template for the exact email that we sent to printers and a list of the vendors, including the one that we chose for Pattern Magazine. So my friends, create the beauty that.

Bonnie Christine:
You want to see come alive in the world.

Bonnie Christine:
And remember, there's room for you.