This month Click Love Grow reaches a brand new milestone as an Online Photography School, publishing our very first In-Print Magazine!

A gorgeous coffee table issue, filled with beautiful images, stories and highlights from our students and community, and a celebration of all that’s been achieved in the last 12months. Plus we wanted to look back and commemorate how the company has grown and evolved since our very first courses began in 2013.

In those eight years we’ve expanded our courses and workshops, we’ve taught thousands of women how to pursue and achieve their photography goals, and we’ve been consistently inspired by the talent, creativity, and kindness that has emerged within our community of women.

So we set out to bundle up all of that into a beautiful magazine that you can take home and enjoy!

And now we’re almost ready to launch the very first issue of our CLG Magazine, so to celebrate, we thought it would be fun to take you behind the scenes to share a little of the process that went into bringing the gorgeous finished product to you!

 

Here’s Emma, the creative force behind the magazine, to take you through exactly how it all came about…

 

The First Seeds Of An Idea

As an online company we get to watch you all learn and grow on our screens as we support you through our courses and creative workshops, and cheer you on in our Grads Groups.

But, just as we always say it’s important to print your work to display on your walls and in albums, Lou has long been looking for a way to bring Click Love Grow to you in print form, because who doesn’t love thumbing through the pages of a gorgeous coffee table book or magazine.

Before joining the CLG team in 2020, I spent 15 years working in magazines and digital media. So when Lou first mentioned to me that she was keen to put together a Click Love Grow Magazine, I was immediately interested and we decided that 2021 was going to be the year!

And so the CLG Magazine was born!

Getting Started

While I’ve had lots of experience working as a content editor and subeditor, and I’ve worked on a magazine launch before, the idea of pulling together an entire magazine from scratch was definitely a wee bit daunting – but also exciting!

With each of us working remotely, Lou, Pam and I jumped on a Zoom brainstorming session. Our ultimate goal was to showcase the very best of YOUR work (our CLG Community), and we wanted to find a way to include as many people as possible in the finished product.

Ultimately, we settled on four main content pillars which align with the lessons in the CLG Enthusiast and Advanced courses – Colour, Composition, Storytelling and Light.

Calling For Submissions

In early August, we opened up a special Facebook group so you could submit your images for each of the main feature sections. We knew that you were excited about the prospect of seeing your images in print, but we didn’t expect to receive more than 3000 submissions in just a few weeks! We were blown away!

Narrowing It Down

In the end, we had so many wonderful submissions and seeing all of your gorgeous work was so inspiring and we wanted to share them all! However we had to narrow it down to the very best and so Lou, Pam and I kept the Zoom lines busy as we jumped on and off calls and in and out of albums.

We began by each going through and choosing our fave images from each category, which we collated into an album,. Then I used these albums as the basis on which to begin designing the content features.

Each feature is 12 pages long, and contains between 20-30 images. That meant choosing just 120-odd images from the more-than 3000 submissions!

The layouts were designed as double page spreads (or DPS as we call them in the industry), so we worked on creating a beautiful consistent flow across each spread, selecting images that worked beautifully together with tones or storytelling to create the finished pages.

Content Frenzy

At the same time, behind the scenes, I was also reaching out to lots of you via email and Messenger to pull together content for some of the other sections in the magazine, including celebrating our Grads Group challenge winners, our Instagram Top 9 images for the year, and even little mini-interviews with some of our CLG Advanced Grads and Creative Workshop Mentors.

We also decided to include a four-page spread on each of this year’s Creative Workshops, including a handful of student images as picked by each mentor.

There’s a letter from Lou (and even her kids wanted in on the action!), we have profiles on all our team so you can get to know them better, and we have a little taste on what’s coming up in 2022.

By the time we were done, we had 114 pages of absolutely beautiful images, along with plenty of stories which share the strength and support of the CLG Community. From cover to cover, the entire magazine is jam packed with goodness!

Proofing, Production And Print

The biggest learning curve definitely came with preparing files for print! All those little buzz words like full bleed, gutters, spine width and safety area were all of a sudden vitally important, making sure that each page prints just as beautifully as it looks on screen.

We printed test copies to check for quality, Lou ordered copies shipped to three different continents to test shipping times (haha you’d be surprised which was the fastest), and my lovely mum sat down one Sunday afternoon with a red pen and went through page by page making sure all the copy was correct (thanks Mum!).

Lou and I jumped on one last Zoom call together to go through and sign off individually on each page, and we were almost there!

Once all the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed, it was time to finally hit ‘submit’ on the final files! After three months of hard work, that was a magical moment!

It’s been a labour of love (at one stage I think I was designing layouts in my sleep) But the end result is a product that we, as a team, are all so very proud of – a glorious print showcase of all of YOUR beautiful work, and a celebration of all things CLG in 2021!

 

Want to Grab Your Own Copy?

Our CLG Magazine will officially go on sale on the 19th Nov!

You can jump on the waitlist NOW so you don’t miss out!