Enjoy the rest of your Wednesday!
I use Blinkplan to lay out all of our digital-only magazines, and I love the ease of use, low price, excellent and speedy customer service, and how convenient it is to share the Blinkplan matrix with my team via email. I highly recommend Blinkplan.
We love Blinkplan - being a dedicated flatplan program, it is much easier and faster to make changes, such as moving sections around and adding or deleting pages. It also helps us keep our whole team up-to-date with the status of our advertisement sales for all our publications.
I highly recommend it as an essential tool for any serious publishing companies.
We run a small business who produces a number of annual 'free-to-the-public' publications. Blinkplan has been a huge help in allowing us to streamline the process of creating these and keep an up-to-date record. The customer service has been excellent and Joerg always replying quickly and efficiently to any queries or issues we have had. We would definitely recommend the service.
Primarily through word-of-mouth alone, Blinkplan has become the world’s favourite publishing flatplanning and pagination tool. For the last 6 years, companies have been switching to Blinkplan because it’s famously easy-to-use. Combine that with our best-in-the-biz customer service, and you’ve got a unique and delightful package.
Blinkplan's at home on the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
Collaborate easily with your teammates. You get to see real-time updates as they make changes, and see who else is online working on your flat plan.
You can post comments on each page - to either leave notes are collaborate with others. Include a @username in the comment to send an email notification to your co-worker.
Multi-page drag&drop makes sure you can easily rearrange your pagination as the month unfolds. Drag & drop has two modes - you can temporarily switch between the modes by holding down the SHIFT (or ALT for Chrome) key when starting to drag. The two modes are "sticky", and "flow".
Easily spot different colour-coded content types (eg, ads, editorial, promotions) to instantly visualize the layout of your magazine.
Easily keep track of totals for each type of content type - either as a page or fraction count, or as a percentage of the whole. By automatically calculating totals of page types, errors can be picked up – for example, if an ad has accidentally been excluded.
You can export a PDF of your flatplan in either portrait or landscape mode. Or you can email a link of a view-only version of the "live" view of your flatplan, but without any of the editing capabilities. The link to the view-only version does not require a login - so anybody who gets a link to it can view it - and will see the latest version of your pagination.
Fill in your content by clicking on the block where you want it. It feels just right.
Upload thumbnails of finished pages to give a more visual look to your flatplans.
You can drag pages from your flatplan onto a holding area. This holding area is a great way to store some pages that you don't yet know where to place.
We have undo functionality so that you can undo all of your changes. That means we don't have to constantly present you with annoying "Are you sure you want to delete this page?" dialog boxes.
When you start off another flat plan, you can base it on your previous flat plans - either just the layout, or the content too. That should get you going as quick as possible.
What if your story spans several pages? Easy - stretch it across all of them in one simple move.
If you need to know where your bind-ins go, you can set up as many as you like, and they appear as lines in between your pages.
Do you want to keep track of which pages have been "Signed off", "Design started", "Not received", "Awaiting Copy" etc? Or any other workflow-type tags or any other system you want to use for tags? Tagged pages get a little visual marker so you can easily see which pages are tagged. You can also filter all your pages by tags to highlight the pages that have been assigned a particular tag.
Once you know how many pages you want, and what sizes your printing company can print, you work out how many of each size of section you need. You can use the calculator to determine whether you created the correct number of pages.
Cheesy screenshot ;)
We’ve been in business for 10 years, so you can depend on us to be here when you need us. We’re profitable, debt-free, and privately owned so we answer to our customers and no one else. Our job is to help you do your job better.
No credit card required. No long term contracts. Pay as you go.
Give Blinkplan a try - it's free for 15 days
Or, click here to try our demo first. No signup or anything required for this - just a click.
You can upgrade or downgrade at any time.
Please note: Each account is valid for one magazine.
From freelancers, to small industry magazines, to glossies, to enormous publishers, Blinkplan is the go-to simple magazine page mapping tool for hundreds of groups world-wide.
Blinkplan has been a god send. For years I looked for an easy, stress-reducing solution to page planning. Excel, inDesign, you name it, but this one makes our lives so much easier. Pages are easy to edit and move around fast and efficiently, while keeping the page numbers. You can work online too, and I've even fixed stuff on my smartphone. And all for a nice competitive subscription price. Oh, and the back office service is top notch.
Collaborate within teams. You can work within a team and collaborate on the same flat plan (or some people call it "railway") and see all the live real-time changes and comments from others appear in your flatplan.
Have over 60 ready made ad-sizes ready for you. There is no need to create your ad sizes, and if there is an ad size that is missing - we will create it for you. It doesn't take long.
Get going quicker. There is no configuration to set up, and you can start working immediately. Blinkplan intelligently sets the right defaults, remembers your categories for the next flatplan, and can base your new railway on your previous one.
Work faster. You can easily move pages around, store them in a Holding Area when you have mind up your mind about where they should go. You can quickly get to just the right piece of content to edit.
Share easily. You can share a snapshot view of your flatplan with anybody - they don't even need a login, and they can easily download a printable PDF version if they like.
Keep totals. No more separate spreadsheets to figure out your editorial/ad split. Let Blinkplan do the boring bits for you.
Flatplans (or flat plans) are called different things in different countries. Here are other names for them:
magazine pagination
magazine layout templates
magazine page maps
mapping layout for magazines
page map templates
Hi there,
We started Blinkplan over six years ago, as there was no other solution out there that allowed you to easily set up a flat plan, and move pages around while keeping your page numbers in tact.
People were using crazy things like Excel, paper, or even Word. I knew there was a simpler way. So the idea of Blinkplan was born.
Blinkplan is a simple pagination tool for magazines that don't use big cumbersome enterprise systems. We built it with a minimal feature set that anyone can use, and we left out everything else.
No clutter. No complexity. No extra features to confuse and overwhelm you.
Whether you’re ready to move on from using Excel or paper, or you’re fed up with complicated pagination software, I hope you’ll give Blinkplan a try. I’m confident that you’ll love it.
And if, for any reason, you don’t think that Blinkplan is the best way for your magazine to handle creating magazine layout templates - if it doesn’t make you more productive - then you won’t pay a penny.
Give it a shot, and email me at to let me know what you think.
Regards,
Founder, Blinkplan
No credit card required. No long term contracts. Pay as you go.
Give Blinkplan a try - it's free for 15 days
Is there anything preventing you from signing up for a free trial at this point? .
Enjoy the rest of your Wednesday!