Lifestyle Living: A Variety Magazine

It seems very simple to publishers to produce a magazine if they have a mix variety of content… magazine for which genre...? 'Lifestyle' of course! At least a dozen of magazines got launched in India last year which are positioned as 'lifestyle' magazine by their publishers. And now one more magazine is launched recently in the same space with the title- Lifestyle Living by Gill India Communications Pvt. Ltd. (you must have read about GICPL in my last post on What Women Want).

Content
May be the intention of publishers of Lifestyle Living was to touch every aspect of life so that it can appeal to everyone, but as the result it is become a magazine which has no editorial direction. The content is absolutely scattered in terms of topicality. Perhaps this product is influenced by GICPL's own in-flight magazine for Spice Jet Airlines- Spiceroute, which has readers who no choice but to read whatever is given to them in the flight.

Less than 90 pages of content of this issue, is divided in six vague sections. Each section is carrying a number of articles on gadgets, cars, architecture, perfumes, travel, places, hotels, fashion, cars, art, entertainment, dance, cigar, formula one, food, living, tattoo, health etc.! Frankly, it is not a smooth reading magazine if you are reading it in one sitting. Each article is different in nature. And top of that each one is written in different style as well. May be because all articles are contributed by outsiders, that is why they don't have any writer in their edit team but they have a long list of editors.

They should understand the difference between a consumer magazine and an in-flight magazine to make it much enjoyable magazine. I have a strong doubt if this kind of poorly structured content can influence a large number of readers to buy it on news stand.

Design
Not impressive at all. Size of Lifestyle Living is larger than a regular magazine, still because of poor design & flawed layout, large size is also failed to make it a classy magazine. Consistency is just ignored every place; be it section names or headings or introductions of boxes… everywhere designers have broken even the basic rules.

Starting right from the master head of the magazine- Lifestyle Living, it is printed pixelleted. What two long yellow thick lines are doing on the cover, or what the cover stories want to say or why the cover stories are also in same yellow color… I can’t understand.

Inner pages are also designed badly. If the height and the width of columns of text is varying from page to page, you can understand designer's lack of knowledge for the layout in a magazine. If same type faces are used for body text & boxes and other elements, God only can save the layout. Only the advertisement pages are looking good in entire issue.

Friends, you must be wondering why I am repeating my comments as I had written is my last post about 'what women want' from the same publication. Trust me, I am not getting biased. Edit team & the design team is common for both the magazines, so how can it be different or better from each other.

Printing
Prepress work could have improved lots of pictures those are poorly printed in this issue. Almost every picture is pixelleted on its edges and many of them have yellow or cyan cast in printing. Otherwise printing is OK.

Product
Paper which is used for inside pages of the magazine and for the covers, are excellent. Physical size of magazine is also impressive but the entire product doesn’t justify its cover price. Inaugural issue of Lifestyle Living is 100 pages thick and is priced at Rs.100. Looking at other lifestyle magazines available in the Indian market (and when some of international brands also have launched in India) price doesn’t seem too high for this genre but looking at the density and the quality of content Lifestyle Living is offering, it too much.

All I can say as the conclusion that I can’t find any reason to buy Lifestyle Living instead of buying any of its competitors at the same price.

----------------------------------------------------------
Content .......................: ●●○○○
Design & Layout ..........: ●◐○○○
Printing ........................: ●●◐○○
Product ........................: ●◐○○○
Value for Money ...........: ●○○○○
----------------------------------------------------------
‘VIRDI’CT ......................: ●●○○○
----------------------------------------------------------

How to use ‘VIRDI’CT..??
●○○○○ Browse & leave it
●●○○○ Borrow & Read it
●●●○○ Buy it occasionally
●●●●○ Buy regularly
●●●●● Subscribe it now!!!