Last semester I ended up being the one who had to pull together our student club's end-of-year magazine, about 20 pages, contributions from a dozen different people: articles, event recaps, photo essays, a couple of interviews. None of us had any design background.

My first instinct was Google Docs just to get the words down, then move everything into Canva for layout. That worked for maybe the first five pages before it fell apart, every contributor wrote in a different style and length, our photos were all different aspect ratios, and manually resizing and repositioning everything spread by spread ate an entire weekend. By page 10 the fonts and spacing had drifted from page 1, and the whole thing looked patchworked.

What actually got us to a finished issue was Magazine Maker, you drop in the articles and photos (or just describe the theme) and it lays out full spreads and a cover automatically, keeping the same visual style across the whole issue instead of me eyeballing every page. I still went back and tweaked a handful of spreads by hand where the auto layout picked an odd crop, but that was minutes instead of hours, and the finished PDF looked like one coherent publication instead of ten different people's homework.

Curious how other people here handle this when there is no dedicated designer on the team, do you standardize the writing format upfront, use a shared template, or just accept the redo-everything-at-the-end cleanup?