A flatplan tool, built to make a magazine

Utgave is a flatplan tool. A flatplan is the page-by-page map of a print issue — which story lands where, what faces what, where the advertising falls against the editorial. If you have ever planned an issue on a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, or a wall of sticky notes, you have made one.

Utgave holds that map. It keeps the shape of the issue as you move things, counts the pages and the advertising as the plan changes so the numbers are always current, and prints a plan that carries a colour legend — so the person holding the printed sheet knows what the colours mean without being told.

That is the whole job. It is a small job to describe and a consuming one to do, which is why a tool for it is worth building at all.

I make IAM 360, a print magazine published by Broadleaf Media. It is real and it ships. I built Utgave to plan it — not to enter a market, not because flatplanning looked like an opportunity, but because I had an issue to get out and needed the plan to hold.

IAM 360 Spring 2025 was planned in Utgave, exported from Utgave, and printed. That issue is documented page by page in my own records, down to the typos that went to print.

I am telling you this plainly because it is the honest version, and because it is also the strongest thing about the product. A tool built to make a specific magazine has been asked real questions at real hours. A tool built to enter a market has been asked to demo well.

Utgave is for the person who has to answer for the shape of an issue — the one who gets asked how many advertising pages are in the book, on a Thursday, without warning, and has to be right. If you are producing a print issue against a deadline and the plan lives in your head or your spreadsheet, this tool was built for the job you are doing.

It is not for everyone, and I would rather say so here than have you find out after signing up. If you want a system that manages your whole editorial operation — commissioning, copy, approvals, publishing — Utgave is not that and does not intend to become it. If your publication is digital-only and never faces a printed page against another printed page, most of what Utgave holds carefully will not matter to you.

A tool that claims to suit everyone suits nobody. This one suits the person with a book to close.

It will not hold your articles. Utgave holds the shape of the issue — where things land, not what they say. The copy lives wherever you write it.

It will not design your pages. The flatplan is the map, not the territory; layout happens in layout software.

And it will not tell you its column set is canonical, because I do not believe a canonical one exists. Elsewhere on this site are two real spreadsheets from one magazine, made by the same person, that do not agree with each other on what the columns should be. A tool that insists on its own shape is calling both of those files wrong, and they were both right.