Everyone has a spine. Sure it's not a part of the body we tend to think about or receive compliments on (how hard would you laugh if someone said, “My what a lovely spine you have …”), but it holds everything together with subtle precision. The same is true of a magazine spine. It's probably the last thing you notice when you pick up your favorite publication, but without it you wouldn't even want to try to sift through the piles of pages.

There are two types of binding for magazines: perfect binding and saddle stitch, otherwise known as wire-sewn. In a perfect bound magazine, printed sections lie on top of each other, with the backs of the sections held together with a thermally activated adhesive. In a saddle-stitched magazine, the sections are stitched inside of each other and held together with wire staples.

So how do you pick the right binding style for your publication?

Continue reading "Show Me Your Spine: How to Choose the Right Binding Style for Your Magazine" »

Hey, I'm looking for someone who eats hot dogs for breakfast and whose last name starts with a C. Anyone out there fit that description? Anyone out there know someone who fits that description?

OK, so that's a strange example, but I was just trying to demonstrate one of the best uses of social media and Web 2.0—crowdsourcing. In very basic terms, crowdsourcing means leveraging your audience to find solutions to your problems—or, in my case, answers to very random questions.

Continue reading "The Power of the Crowd" »

Judging from the hits, our post last year on creating style guides filled a need. If you're just starting this process, or perhaps dusting off your current guide and thinking of remodeling, we thought we'd offer some tips on things you simply must have in your style guide. Typically, these are items that raise the most questions from readers or, if you are a custom publisher, from your clients:

Continue reading "Style (Guide) Must-Haves " »

The Hammock Team shares some of our grammar pet peeves

You'll often find us walking up and down the halls with a red pen tucked behind an ear, resting in a shirt pocket or in-hand, always ready to lend a scribble or two to the editing process for our magazines and newsletters.

Though all of our publications have their own style guides, which help us answer specific questions as they come up, bad grammar is just bad grammar. Here are a few examples that really put us over the edge:

Continue reading "Watch Your Apostrophes and Possessives (They Tend to Make Us a Little Crazy)" »

One of my greatest objections to English grammar is the concept of the gender-neutral pronoun. I'm all for gender equality, but I object to the unwieldy sentences it has created. Take this egregious example from an automobile safety card:

"The passenger should keep his or her seatbelt fastened at all times to protect himself or herself in the event of an accident."

Continue reading "His or Her or Their or Neither?" »