Most software companies don’t make print magazines. So when Jane first started floating the idea of Front Desk back in 2023, we asked ourselves: can we create a magazine that helps practitioners feel less alone about the challenges of balancing patient care with running a business? And more importantly, will they actually want to read it?
Seven volumes later, thousands of copies of Front Desk magazine have found their way into clinic waiting rooms, conference tote bags, and practitioner bookshelves across North America.
And just this month, Front Desk won an In-House Design Award from the Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD), Canada’s largest professional association for graphic designers. These awards specifically recognize outstanding creative work by internal teams, and for a magazine built from scratch by a small, dedicated team of designers, illustrators, and writers at Jane, we’re especially proud of this one.
As it turns out, practitioners really did want a magazine that spoke to the parts of their work nobody else was talking about, and a big part of that is the care and intentionality behind how Front Desk was designed from the very beginning.
Keepable by design
At the heart of every issue is Georgina Abella, Staff Graphic Designer at Jane and Creative Lead for Front Desk. Since the beginning, Georgina has helped shape the magazine into something that earns a practitioner’s attention in the first ten seconds, and holds it. One of the principles that guides every issue is what the team at Front Desk has come to call “keepability.”
Georgina Abella, Staff Graphic Designer at Jane
Keepability is what happens when every design choice reflects how practitioners actually read: the feel of the paper in your hands, generous whitespace that keeps the pages from feeling overwhelming, and layouts designed for practitioners who often only have a few minutes to themselves between appointments. It all adds up to something a practitioner wants to return to again and again. Something keepable.
“Something can be useful and still get overlooked, or beautiful without actually saying anything,” Georgina says. “I was intentional about each page being both: helpful and worth pausing for.”
Interior of Jane’s Front Desk magazine
That sense of care shows up in the kinds of details that can only exist in print: tear-away affirmation cards, cut-out awards, and custom spine artwork that lines up across volumes when the issues are stacked side by side. “Print isn’t dead,” Georgina says. “You just have to give people something worth holding onto.”
The people behind every page
Front Desk is a collaboration. Every issue involves writers, editors, photographers, illustrators, fact checkers, and production partners working together to build something useful, delightful, and deeply human. “Design doesn’t happen in a silo,” Georgina says. “This is a product of creative collaboration with my Managing Editor and creative collaborator Vasiliki Marapas, Editor-in-Chief Denzil Ford, and many of our pals at Jane like illustrators Olivia Burton and Christina Kruger-Woodrow, whose hand-drawn illustrations and clinic critter cartoons bring so much warmth to every volume.”
Some of the creative minds behind Jane’s Front Desk magazine
That’s what makes an award from fellow designers especially meaningful: it speaks to the years of care, creativity, and collaboration that go into every issue.
“This award from the RGD comes from peers who understand craft, and that means a lot when so much of the work that goes into a publication like this lives in the details,” Georgina says. “For something that started as a bit of an experiment, having that work acknowledged by the design community feels really good.”
The whole point
“The thing I’m most proud of is that Front Desk has actually meant something to practitioners,” Georgina says. “I love hearing from readers at conferences or in our inbox that it genuinely helped them navigate raising their fees, their first year in practice, or just feel less alone in running a clinic. But I’m also proud of what it represents as a design object: in-house, from scratch, across seven volumes.”
And at the end of the day, every design decision, every print detail, and every volume has always been in service of the practitioners who continue to read, share, and see themselves in Front Desk.
“I want them to feel seen,” Georgina says. “I want them to know that they’re not alone. That we’ve taken those problems as our own as we find ways to support them through it. Through all of that, I hope they feel that this kind of care isn’t just something they get in Front Desk magazine but also something they get throughout their whole experience with Jane.”
Jane is a practice management platform for allied health and wellness practitioners, designed to help the day-to-day work of running a clinic feel a little easier. Front Desk is one of the ways we try to do that beyond the software, because the people running clinics deserve tools, resources, and a community that actually understands their work.