Each issue followed a strict, waterfall, almost industrial production cycle. Three months before publication, the whole team of editors, designers, photo editors, producers, would gather to plan the skeleton of the next publication of the magazine. Each designer was assigned a set of articles, on average each of us worked on about a third of the pages in an issue.

The process was highly structured. Together with the editor responsible for an article, I would sketch and design multiple versions of a layout. These drafts moved through a hierarchy of approvals: commercial team, section editor, editor-in-chief, and sometimes even the global headquarters. If one of the stakeholders didn’t sign off, the article looped back through the chain.

When the design was finally approved, our focus shifted to prepress. Every detail had to prepared for printing and checked (e.g., color accuracy, image quality, alignment). Right before the deadline, our design team would always spend long hours making sure all details were correct before the magazine was printed.

Next day after approving all pages for print, the new production cycle started, and the process was repeated twelve times a year (or even thirteen, if there was a bonus issue!), year after year.