Everyone was really nice
You don’t have any much creative say-so
It might have been slightly delusional of 20-year-old me to swan into a publishing job and be given free reign to do whatever I pleased with artwork and design but I was hoping that it wouldn’t be so regimented and uniform with the layouts, fonts, colours and design but it was. I won’t lie, there would be certain pages like large fashion spreads that allowed for a little creativity but generally it wasn’t too inspiring.
Beauty sales were the best thing ever, ever. Ever.
So magazines get sent a LOT of products. All sorts passed through the doors of our magazine and ended up on the beauty editors desk be it make-up, fragrances, hairdryers, you name it. When the products were either tweeted about or featured for the magazine they ended up in the ‘beauty cupboard’ and every few months the beauty cupboard would get cleared out and boxes upon boxes of products, electrical and more would be on sale. You’d fill a large shopping bag and pay £10 for the lot and be the proud owner of plenty of new make-up (which most of the time didn’t match your skin tone at all but hello, it was practically free!?)
It taught me so much
Although I wasn’t at the mag for too long (the pay wasn’t great and the commute was a bitch) I learnt so, so much about where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. I also learnt a lot of useful skills when it came to my graphic, web design and even writing/proofing knowledge and I still use lots of the little tweaks and tricks eve now.