The Absolute Sound is a strictly-templated print magazine (for good reason - we made the template and its rules), but despite that, the music section of TAS gives us some of the most design freedom issue to issue, in my opinion. Music editor Jeff Wilson works hard to gather excellent photography and keeps the feature content varied, giving us great material to work with. Like most designers, I prefer a strict template, which allows for better designed pages than if you have complete freedom to do anything you want.

Following that section, the music review page layouts are very, very standardized, very templated single or two-column reviews with album artwork, ratings, and some information at the end about other music you may like.

These are some of my favorite pages to design in The Absolute Sound (I think a great idea for future special issues would be to compile some of the best features and all of the music reviews dating back as far as possible, and gather it together in a series of print books. I think readers would eat them up). 

Sure, these pages are not going to win design awards year after year - they are copy-heavy, we frequently have to work around fractional ads in layout - but they are consistent in quality of design, content, and are a signature feature of the magazine now. They follow the look and feel of the whole magazine, but are very much their own thing.

Take a look at some recent samples of pages from this section below. We are available to make your magazine look this good – give us a call or shoot us an email.