Issue 1 is OUT

1. Nice first shot, just some feedback:

   The overall design needs lots of work… Rounded corners went out in 1986 and the ubuntu-logo font does not necessarily make for a good magazine font. (I’m sure I won’t be the only person you’ll be hearing that from). Personally, I’m not a fan of full justify for such large font sizes and narrow column widths.

   The TOC needs some work to and needs to better feature the highlights of the issue rather than being like an “index” you’d find at the back of a book.

   Some of the regular sections (if that what’s they are) could use a little explanation, such as “My Desktop”. For example, that section might lead with “Each month, Full Circle features a reader’s desktop.. blah blah… If you would like your desktop featured blah blah…” Likewise in the “Letters”, “Q&A” and you want to prompt readers for action right in those sections… (like you did in Linux Games)

   In general, I’d say you might actually have too much content there for a free monthly(?) magazine with no ads and might want to consider shortening it a bit (by a third or half). It would certainly be easier to keep pace and your reader’s might find it more digestible…

   Good luck with the new venture!

2. Guys, excellently done.

   For being a partial newb to Ubuntu (converted from Fedora), I found a lot of interesting info in the issue.

   The only thing I wanna know is who would fail a kid (p. 36) for loading Ubuntu on their laptop?!?!? Dude, Extra credit!!!

3. Congrats guys.

   Layout’s good, content’s awesome. Looking forward to issue 2. Well done.

4. Congrats!
   Rawkin issue … lookin forward for the next 1 🙂

5. Hi,

   Hopefully you won’t take my notes as offence. Here are my observation regarding layout and typesetting:

   – strange choice of fonts: you use 4 faces of MgOpenData which is designed for Greek texts rather that texts containing Latin letters
   – I do not observe use of modular grid;
   – alignment of frames is not correct in too many cases to mention; do you use Snap to Guides option?
   – do you use baseline alignment?
   – rounding corner radius for rectangles is different everywhere;
   – choice of paragraph styles settings could be better (header text smaller than paragraph text in some cases, huge font size for paragraph text);
   – you use both stars and dashes as itemized list markers (inconsistence), while you have bullets insertable right from Insert menu;
   – hyphenation would help getting rid of huge spaces *a lot*;
   – dashes instead of em-dashes are used in some cases;
   – widow/orphan lines are present;
   – different quotation pairs are used (p. 36);
   – not everything was spellchecked;
   – usually screenshots have captions or are placed close to their context;
   – why not creating bookmarks for those who read from screen to help navigating?

   I have comments on content too, but I’d hold it for now. Hopefully you will fix at least some of the above for next issues 😉

   Wishing you good luck with your project!

6. I think the issue is great, I do agree on the pdf comment, though i don’t see anything wrong with rounded corners… however, the issue does need a more careful proofreading, I’ve noticed several errors, incudling duplicated blocks of text, (page 32 for one).

   otherwise…. that’s great!

7. reply to jim:
   pdf IS an accessible format.

8. Looks Good, Thanks

9. Hi. First of all, I want to thank the team for making such an amazing mag. You rock, people. Backwards of what Nate (message number one) said, I think it has been beautifully designed. I’m going to print it and show my friends that you do not need closed source software to make something with that quality (and, of course, introduce them to Ubuntu in a way they will not forget so easily).
   Now, I just wanted to let you (the editor) know… well, check out page 32. It has an error (repeated text, common occurrence XD).
   Saying thanks again, -Guille

10. We’ve noticed all those problems. Our layout (used for Issue 0 and 1) was just a quick job – we didn’t get an actual designer to look at it – it was just made for our preview issue. We’re going to fix a lot of that stuff (more clean lines, not as many rounded corners, font, more white space, alignment, etc) in future issues (probably 2, 3, and 4). You can talk to us about all your gripes about the magazine at our meeting tomorrow – see the top post on the front page.

11. @ Guille – “beautifully designed”?! Wow…just…wow…

    I’m glad at least the creators see the obvious design deficiencies and I’m sure will get some other constructive criticism from others in the field. It’s a too bad a little more attention wasn’t paid to polishing the look of the first issue – first impressions and all that – but what’s done is done and there’s nowhere to go from here but up! 🙂

    Again, great work guys – looking forward to see what you come up with for next issue…

12. Thanks for another great magazine! Just a quick comment on presentation: it gets opened in multipage mode (continuous-facing) in Acrobat Reader 5, although my preferences are set to single page. Kpdf displays it fine in single page mode. I don’t know if it’s intended that way, so I thought I better mention it. Here’s a screenshot: http://tinyurl.com/3ygs9p

13. Thank you much!

    I think this e-zine will help Ubuntu beginners to get involved to Linux easily)

    I’ enjoy reading this magazine and I will wait next issues!

    Wish you all the best!

14. I like your magazine and consider it a well done piece of community work, despite of some initial flaws already mentioned by Alexandre. It would be nice, if you could add some backstage info to our Scribus Wiki Success Stories. Please drop me a short e-mail at wikiaccount at scribus info if you feel like doing it and need a Scribus Wiki account.

15. Just like to congratulate you for this new magazine. Glad to have it with .pdf format. Looking forward to downloading issue 2.

16. Nice Mag!

    An idea: inspired by TUX Mag, why not make it in landscape format instead of portrait? Would make life a lot easier for us screen-readers, and the paper readers would have a nice, café-cool format to read… 🙂

17. I am registered as dwk and I am logged in. I am trying to download issue #1 and I get a message that “I am looking for something that is not here”. What do I do. Thanks

18. Nice content, but as mentioned the design needs work. In general, I don’t think you should have any background but white…

    I’m thinking something along the lines of http://www.ohweb.com.ar/videos/Revista.jpg, which was made with scribus.

19. I have been getting the same message as dwk regarding the download of issue #1. Do you plan keeping it offline.

20. @ Lee (etc) – there was a problem with the link in this post (now fixed), sorry about that. The correct link was still available through the Downloads page…

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