The passion shines through when you love what you do.

Much like the individuals who grace her cover, accomplished personalities who have each excelled at their calling, Ria Prieto’s keenness for the visual medium is evident on every page of her year-old baby, Inquirer RED Magazine.

RED, a lifestyle monthly that comes free with the Inquirer on every second or third Sunday, was conceived to cater to a high-end market, and to inspire readers  with discerning tastes who aspire to a certain way of life. RED is published under the Inquirer Group of Companies.

Leafing through a 30-, 40-page copy of RED is like sauntering through the good life. It’s a meticulously curated catalog of one’s yearnings, replete with bold images and succinct text.

“I’m very happy to be doing a magazine again,” says Prieto, RED’s editor in chief, who worked at a fashion glossy before she married. “I was always into visuals, that’s what I loved doing in the magazine. I’m not a writer.”

RED was designed to have more visuals and shorter texts as compared to the newspaper and other glossies, she adds.

“We want RED to be a visual guide on how to live life. That’s why we show vignettes, for instance, of chic spaces,” so readers can be inspired to design their own spaces “within their means,” she says of the magazine’s section called “inspiRED.”

Atypical formula

It’s giving the reader the peg to make that, say, side table distinct to his/her own taste. It’s not about ripping off the entirety of the image, but being stirred by it to create one’s own.

RED also steers clear of the typical formula of using movie stars on the cover to sell copies. “We choose people who have found their passion and have excelled in it,” says Prieto. And unlike society magazines, they don’t put someone on the cover “just because you’re rich.”

On its maiden issue in November 2012, there was renowned accessories designer Bea Valdes. Models-turned-photographers Jo Ann Bitagcol and Sara Black have also appeared on the cover, as well as fashion entrepreneur Mandy de la Rama. On its first anniversary issue was Anne Gonzalez, the woman who brought Havaianas to the Philippines.

For December, cover girl is Preview magazine editor Pauline Juan. The monthly cover story is aptly called “admiRED.”

“We’re gender-neutral, and our target market is both male and female,” Prieto says. “In the end, we also know that even men will still pick up a magazine with a woman on the cover.”

While RED also does the occasional fashion shoot, its fashion section, “attiRED,” and beauty page, “barED,” focus on the products, meticulously picked out and presented in stunning layouts.

“We want to make the products the star,” says its editor. Even the advertorials are customized, done in-house and laid out organically into the editorial pages.

RED also features up-and-coming visual artists, as well as a page for foodies (“devouRED”) and short travel stories (“exploRED”). It has a section called “empoweRED,” photographic profiles of influential people and how they came to be so. In the November 2013 issue, tycoon Ramon Ang talked about his secrets to success.

Thematic Q&A

In lieu of the usual society and party pages that are a standard of other glossies, RED gets its readers involved with a thematic Q&A in a section called “inquiRED.”

The magazine is sensibly designed for busy individuals who have little time to peruse magazines—or have short attention spans. Associate editor Mara Santillan Miano points out that a typical person won’t always pore through an entire thick magazine. More likely, she adds, the reader will only scan a few pages. But not if it’s in a skinnier format like RED’s, which is only about a third of the thickness of a regular glossy.

“We designed RED for advertisers who are paper-sensitive and want to see their products in glossy format,” Prieto says. “And it’s also to show that Printown (Inquirer’s printing company) can print high-quality magazines.”

Next year, RED will also begin doing 16-pager adverts, an “insert within the insert.”

Readers can find free copies of RED in top salons, coffee shops, hotels, PowerBooks, Philippine Airlines platforms, as well as gated villages in Metro Manila, Cebu and Davao. Archived copies of RED can be found online at inquirer.net/red. It’s also on Facebook (Inquirer RED Magazine-OFFICIAL), Twitter (@inquirerRED) and Instagram (@inquirerred).