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Saturday, May 30, 2009

BINDIYA: Chamkegi Ya Nahin?

After the release of ‘SHUKRAWAR’ in the last year, Perls News Network also launched ‘MONEY MANTRA’ in the beginning of this year. And maintaining the same pace the PNN group has now launched another monthly magazine for women- ‘BINDIYA’. All the three magazines are in Hindi and Editor of BINDIYA, Shrikant Tripathi is confident that like their previous two magazines, BINDIYA will also be great success.

Being a women interest magazine, BINDIYA has its well established competitions like MERI SAHELI, JAGRAN SAKHI, GRIH SHOBHA, GRIH LAKSHAMI, VANITA, MANORAMA, GOOD HOMEMAKER and recently launched HINDI FEMINA etc. Tripathi doesn’t consider even a single women Hindi magazine at the standard where he put his BINDIYA. But, that is not true only for women Hindi magazines, in fact it is true for almost all the Hindi magazines. Gone are those days when we used to refer DHARMYUG, SAPTAHIK HINDUSTAN, SARVOTTAM and all for good Hindi literature.

Content
Whatever is claimed about making it ‘different’ from others, it is more or less the same. Selection and compilation of articles seems that BINDIYA is trying to attract every segment and every aspect of an Indian woman. From a teenager to a mature woman, from a working lady to an entrepreneur and from a college going lady to a house wife, everybody is targeted to hook into this.

In order to satisfy such a broad set of audience, most of the time content gets diversified. If it not structured properly and not presented in a strict discipline, it becomes a mess. BINDIYA is carrying a good number of articles and that’s why it is divided into several departments. But entire magazine doesn’t seem structured.

Language & usages of words has lots of inconsistency across the magazine. With this kind of negligence, how can a magazine become a great literary magazine? And while working with Hindi publishing software, one should take care of few technical tricks which are totally ignored in BINDIYA and that is why it has lots of typo errors (though those can be corrected if subbing was perfect).

Design
Design is fine if it is not great. It has maintained consistency at some places but some place it has lost, may be in order to try something ‘different’. But it could be better if it was little disciplined and a few basics of designing were taken care. Stock images are used excessively and that disconnects a reader from the magazine.

Cover image is attractive but doesn’t go with the positioning of the magazine. Cover stories are arranged & placed badly and eventually the cover is turned a bad cover. Colors & design elements used in the magazine are outdated & give a substandard look to the magazine.

Printing
Printing quality of BINDIYA is good. Only a few images are of low resolution or may be those are picked up from the web and that’s why they are printed bad. Pre-press could correct the skin tones at least to make magazine more beautiful.

Product
Paper used for the magazine is good. Launch issue of BINDIYA is carrying center pinned 134 pages of regular A4 size and it is priced at Rs20. If you look at the quantity of reading material, it is really worth it. Quality of articles is also good and you can appreciate it if you can ignore the claims of being ‘different from other women magazine’ that is made in the editorial itself.

As conclusion, BINDIYA is just another women Hindi magazine that has to improve a lot to take a lead from others but for sure it can survive as it is without struggle even in the crowd of other competing magazines.
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Saturday, May 02, 2009

YUVA: Overconfident!

YUVA is a fortnightly magazine that is launched last week by e-sense entertainment pvt Ltd. As claimed in publisher’s note, YUVA is going to target entire youth of between 18-30years of age and will become a movement (!?) to help them to bring a change in the country!!! But after seeing the execution, in terms of first issue of YUVA, I would call it overconfidence!

Content
Publishers of YUVA might have thought that youth can be related to everything- politics, environment, economy, business, trends, career, lifestyle, relationships, health and lots of day to day issues of lives- so let’s start a unique magazine to hook them together and change the nation. In my understanding, YUVA is not doing anything which is never done earlier. Probably they should know that this genre is called ‘general interest’ and so many other magazines are already there in the same space. And if it is about targeting youth, again there are a lot in that space also like JAM, IGT, JLT and earlier version of YUVA… and we all know their credibility!

When you claim that it is covering everything, it precisely means that it has no focus. While trying to cater all the needs of youth, YUVA has become ‘khichadi’ only. It has no defined edit structure, no focus, no philosophy come through its articles… Topics are picked up on random rather on availability basis. Each article is written & structured in its own style, there is no consistency and not a single thought is coming out while going through article by article.

Cover of the launch issue of YUVA is conceptualized as if it is one of the current affair magazines. It has election (Gandhi vs Gandhi) as the main story and IPL in one corner… nothing else there that can show its ‘wide’ range of content coverage!

You keep on reading YUVA from start to end and you will not able to know the direction where it wants to lead the youth and the nation ultimately!

Design
Same ‘philosophy’ is reflected in its design also… philosophy of doing everything in one magazine! I think that designers were left free to implement their own style to design every single page separately, and that is why entire launch issue of YUVA has become like a catalog of so many design templates. Each page has so many and so different design elements that each page is looking different from each other. Not a single page seems that it belongs to the one single magazine only.

What worse could be done that it has no consistent grid or body copy style in the magazine and that you can not do in the name of ‘contemporary youth’ or ‘creativity’. On the cover itself, there are so many unnecessary effects & design elements are put and those are adding no value to the design.

Illustrations used inside the pages are very unprofessional that also adds one more negative in its design.

Printing
That is one thing which is reasonably good. At least press has done its job effectively, whatever is given to print, is printed well. Few images are of low resolution and in return they are printed pixellated. Lots of photographs are printed in unrealistic & unnatural colors and that shows the poor prepress work as well. It would have printed even better if prepress has done their job perfectly.

Product
Paper used for the magazine is good. YUVA is a center pinned magazine of 100-110 pages of regular A4 size and it is priced at Rs30. If you can appreciate a collection of various colored magazines of your local newspaper, its good deal.

YUVA seems nothing more than an unprofessional compilation of color supplements which has features, gadgets, roadside nonsense surveys, jokes, tarot and whatever unimportant you can think.

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Content .....................: ●◐○○○
Design & Layout ........: ●○○○○
Printing ......................: ●●●○○
Product ......................: ●●○○○
Value for Money .........: ●○○○○
----------------------------------------------------------
‘VIRDI’CT ....................: ●○○○○
----------------------------------------------------------

How to use ‘VIRDI’CT..??
●○○○○ Browse & leave it
●●○○○ Borrow & Read it
●●●○○ Buy it occasionally
●●●●○ Buy regularly
●●●●● Subscribe it now!!!