How to Read ReadyMade Magazine

I love ReadyMade magazine and have been a semi-frequent purchaser, and now subscriber, since issue 5. Reading about other projects is inspiring stuff. I rarely make any of the projects, I'm usually inspired to do something else, but it's still awesome.

The only damper on this parade of Awesomeness is that the instructions can be tough to read. So let's fix that.

Open up an issue of ReadyMade and go to the project section, the meat of the magazine where you can read instructions for making something cool. This one is for making a camera mount for your dashboard.

On the web there is infinite space to work with. In a magazine the writers get one or two pictures and a few hundred words to describe their project. To get the most out of their column inches, the folks at ReadyMade cram all the instructions back-to-back, forming one solid column of text.

This technique is annoying when reading because it's easy to get lost on the page. When actually doing a project and going back and forth from work to reading it's even worse. This affects me more than most since I've always had a hard time reading text on a page to begin with.

To make this easier, I like to add a visual aid so that my eyes don't get lost.

The visual aid is the yellow hue from a highlighter. If you're in school you probably already have one and if you work in an office you can find one near the Post-Its. Just make sure you put it back when you're done, OK?

All you're going to do is highlight every even step in the process. So get started by highlighting the second step.

Like I said, you're highlighting every even step, so highlight step 4, step 6, step 8,...

Less than a minute later you'll be done!

With all of the yellow shapes on the page it's easier to find your last position and get back into the instructions. Here's another example with the process applied to a tutorial on building a chair.

It's a simple trick, but it's helped me out a ton in wading though all the copy.