This is what a periodical looks like once the printing has stopped being a decision. The workflow becomes a smooth journey from PDF to delivery with both sides comfortable in the outcome.
The Summer 2026 issue carries a sepia still life of flowers in a painted vase under the silver script masthead, with the cover line "This Issue: Tom Lee – Glass Plate Orotones, Jed Pearson – Selfie Shtick". Inside are Tom's orotone landscapes in deep gold on a charcoal-grey text page, a photo essay from his Newport exhibition with the framed plates hung in a grid, a full-bleed pair of sepia street photographs across pages 10 and 11, and Jed Pearson's pinhole self-portraits, a saxophonist dissolving into window light and a figure blurred against a railing. It is an A4 magazine of 32 pages, and that format keeps it affordable at 30 copies a quarter.
A self-cover magazine is printed on one stock from front to back: the cover is simply the outer four pages of the same 170gsm gloss as everything else, with no heavier board and no lamination. For a short-run periodical that is the economical route, because there is one paper, one press pass and one finishing step, and at 170gsm the cover is still stiff enough to feel like a magazine rather than a leaflet. Gloss is the finish with the most punch and sheen, and it earns its place in a photography journal: the golden orotone tones and the dense blacks of the pinhole work sit on a surface that bounces light back through the ink, giving the images a depth and saturation a matt sheet would soften. Mike's note from handling Issue 5 was that the cover is easy to open and the pages lie flat, which is exactly what a 32-page stapled A4 does. He also wondered whether uncoated might suit the pinhole pages, a fair question: uncoated would lend them a softer, more analogue feel, but at the cost of the colour fidelity that keeps Tom coming back.
Photographers are the hardest audience a printer has: they know exactly what the file looked like on a calibrated screen and will hold the print up against it.
Tom's verdict after Issue 1, in a reviews.io review, is the one we care about: "true to colour (despite CMYK) and I couldn't be more happy".
CMYK cannot reach every colour a backlit monitor can, so the trick is consistency. Once you have seen how your golds and shadows come out on 170gsm gloss, you can prepare the next issue knowing precisely what will arrive, and that is the real argument for running every issue on the same stock. Stapling, for the record, works from 8 to 72 pages in multiples of four, so a 32-page issue could grow to 40 or 48 without changing the binding.
Tom's Issue 5 PDF weighed in at 244MB; large files are fine, but a print-ready PDF exported at 300dpi rather than at camera resolution will get through the checks faster. He was away until the 15th, so we held the finished copies and timed the delivery to reach Neston, Cheshire for the week he was back rather than leaving 30 magazines on a doorstep. Small things, but a periodical needs them: a printer who knows the spec, keeps a file copy of every issue, and sends the next one to arrive when you are there to sign for it. Help "at the end of an email or telephone", as Tom put it. If you want to see where the journal started, Issue 1 of Focus Quarterly went to press a year earlier on the identical spec.
If you have a photography journal, a club annual or a first issue in the works, get a price for magazine printing at exwhyzed.com, or send Harriet and Mike your spec and we will tell you whether gloss, silk or uncoated will serve your pictures best.
