What makes the perfect magazine cover?
We challenged our designer, Chris Keller, to pick some magazines based solely on the cover and then explain to us what made the cover design so enticing.
Chris Keller, senior designer
I’ll be honest, I’m not a big reader at the best of times – mainly because I tend to be a very visual-led person ... and my attention span isn’t too great either. So, if I don’t like the look of a publication, I’m highly unlikely to read on.
I visited Magazine Heaven for this challenge because it gave me a huge range of magazines to choose from. While looking through the various sections and racks I began to notice the wide range in price, from the ‘couple-of-quid weekly titles’, all the way up to £40 annual architecture journals (these were stunning though; a far reach from my £1.20 Kerrang magazine which I used to buy on a weekly basis back when I was at college).
So, from that point I took the decision to set a spending limit on the basis of ‘would I be happy to spend this each week/month?’
Here are the magazines I chose that day …
Magazine one: Courier, £5
Courier is a bi-monthly magazine founded in 2012 which covers the start-up and modern-business culture.
Initially, the bold simple, legible masthead on a plain background grabbed my attention (sometimes the top third of a cover is all that’s visible). The attention-grabbing masthead coupled with the use of a spot colour and minimal hand-rendered elements add to what is quite a simple cover.
The simplicity of the cover allows the primary message to be clearly communicated. The cover is a great example of how all the elements work together. All type on the cover has a clear hierarchy and purpose – it guides your eyes down the page organically, from the bold masthead, to the feature title which compliments the image, down to the coloured box containing further features which acts as a footer.
I was intrigued to see if the simple style of the cover continued inside and if any other print finishes were used. The bulk of the pages do follow quite a simple format, where the structure of the article is very easy to follow with any secondary information clearly displayed in the various boxouts.
A handful of the pages are busier in content and help break up the longer features. There is also an 8-page section of the mag where the pages are shorter in width (which, annoyingly, you always thumb to).
Magazine two: Popular Science, £5.50
Popular Science (also known as PopSci) is an American quarterly magazine that focuses on science and technology for a more general audience.
The size and location of the masthead initially caught my eye. The title is over two decks (lines) and situated in a box and takes up a good third of the cover which I felt didn’t follow the typical format for most magazines.
The conceptual artwork on the cover gives a sense of the unknown; the image alone will give the reader a loose idea of what the main feature is about.
The cover has a few things I like:
The way the image interacts with the masthead
How the issue sits nicely between the ‘L’ and ‘A’.
I like how the space on the top, left- and right-hand sides are all equally spaced from the type and masthead creating a frame.
The minimal colour palette ties the whole page together.
On thumbing through the mag, the pages each looked bespoke. This kept the content fresh, and not knowing how the next feature will look made me want to keep turning the page.
So, what makes a good cover?
The use of strong imagery to portray a key message is vital to any cover. If you get it right you can use less copy to create a more powerful piece.
A great image will do a lot of the hard work for you, as you are essentially using the other cover elements on the page to help frame the image.
So, my advice would be to really focus on the image that you are using, everything else should be guided by that.
