On November 20, 2012, Professor Andrea Baron’s Magazine Production and Design class went to visit Quad/Graphics located on W. 50th St. Quad/Graphics is one of the largest magazine printers in the United States and the facility we visited does the prepress and retouching work for many national magazines.

We took a tour around the various departments of the company and got an understanding, in a very hands-on way, of what the process of getting a magazine to the readers encompasses. We were walked thorough the steps taken to finalize magazine images and complete pages, organizing the work to meet tight production schedules, watched experts retouch images, saw the production of the newest interactive accompaniment to print magazines!

The future of the digital age in terms of magazines is very promising, according to Quad/Graphics. They have developed an application that works with Augmented Reality technology in print magazines. With your Ipad and your iPhone or other tablet, a reader can scan over a magazine cover or advertisement and an interactive application will appear for the reader to navigate around. The class was able to play around with these magazines and iPads to really understand how it works. We were also shown how these interactive applications are created for companies. This creates a whole new platform for publishing in a more hands-on and interactive method, which is very exciting for the future of magazines and publishing.