The Irrational Hatred for All Things "Cookie Cutter"

As people who know me will tell you, I love a good analogy. I love bad analogies. I just love analogies - analogies are like pictures and worth a thousand words... see what I did there?

Well, today I'll talk about the analogy of the cookie cutter. It seems everyone hates anything that could be labeled as a cookie cutter. Sure, we all want to be special and unique and love the idea of hand-crafted but sometimes something just works.

Cookie cutters fill an important role in making cookies, they help your cookies all look good, enable you to do it quickly and reduce waste. That's a good combination and shaping cookies by hand would just be a waste of time for most of us.

In a similar fashion, the world we live in is cookie cutter. Most local magazines use the same or similar paper sizes, most are color, most have ad to edit ratios between 40/60 and 50/50 and so on. Does that mean that two publications in the same market are identical? Of course not. So, how does a magazine set itself apart? Well, by having incredibly relevant, well-written, content and quality photography.

Wouldn't you know it the web is similar. You surely want your digital presence to reflect your publication from a design perspective but expecting your website to be "unique" would be akin to saying I want to have my magazine use a "unique" type of paper... it just doesn't exist, there are standards and best practices which result in magazines (and websites) to look increasingly similar - at face value. Learn more about the differences between print and web design and if you're not sure what type of website you want for your magazine, learn more about the different types of websites.

So, when you think about your web presence focus more on the content and less on breaking from a "cookie cutter" design.