Margarita-4 is a magazine template for Adobe FrameMaker. It is a design based on a 2 columns, 3 columns and 4 columns layout and intended for semi-academic, technology oriented content. The layout options are quite versatile and it is easy to customize.
Room for ads
It is quite common to have ads in your magazine, which is why we have created master pages which will accomodate just that. We have made room for three sizes - two in landscape and one in portrait.
FrameMaker vs Indesign for magazine publishing
If you want to do a flashy commercial magazine layout you should use Adobe InDesign. If you want to publish a magazine with a focus on content, Adobe FrameMaker is a more obvious choice. Magazine publishing differs from book publishing/brochure publishing in the sense that you want to have a recognizable design and layout between the issues, but you also want to have individual and creative solutions in each issue. So the magazine design needs to accomodate fixed designs with options for creative overrides. Which is what we have tried to accomplish with "Margarita-4"
Typography
The templates is built upon the fonts Georgia and Calibri - both fonts which are freely availble with Windows 10.
Multicolumn design
Multicolumn design is an option which is available in Adobe FrameMaker, but it can be a bit tricky if you want to work with more columns than two, AND have some creative freedom. This is where master pages comes in. We have used custom master pages to help you easily switch between different layouts. Using master pages you can have table spanning only two out of four columns and have images sitting in different positions without disrupting the text flow.
Please note!
We want to respect licensing rules on images. When we are developing our designs we mainly use photos from Pexels.com. While the photos are free to use, they may not be free to distribute in a context as ours. Which is why we distribute the images in the templates in blurred greyscales, but the Read Me file has links to all the images on Pexels.com.
