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MAGAZINES
And the Art of the
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372
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Foreword
Art. Fashion. Hobbies.
Sports. Business. Science
and Technology. Magazines
have always held a decisive
role as artifacts of society’s
visual culture. Portable, repetitive, and versatile in their
visual and typographic design,
they exist as a unique medium
that is useful both as an indicator of current trends and as a
visual artifact of our cultural
past. These factors, in consideration of the roughly 4,800
circulations of magazines from
over 280 categories currently in
print in the U.S.,1 have allowed
magazines to retain their
position at the forefront of
modern communication and
graphic design.
“[There are] roughly
4,800 circulations of
magazines from over
280 categories currently in print
in the U.S.
”
In his book, MagCulture:
New Magazine Design, author
Jeremy Leslie writes, “Magazines
remain, at their most basic level,
a combination of text an image
between editors and designers...
A good magazine will always
have a good grasp of journalism,
a good editor will understand
the importance of design.” 2
Indeed, without grasping and
innovative content a magazine
can never hope to survive.
But we, as readers
of the Information Age, are
fickle consumers. We are
quick to judge a book (or
magazine) by its cover and, if
we do not like what we see,
are equally quick to discard
it. “Design is now seen as a
badge,” said Tony Chambers,
the Art Director for the
British edition of Gentlemen’s
Quarterly (GQ) Magazine, a
popular international fashion magazine for men. “Our
readers want well-designed
cars, suits and magazines.” 3
The elements of design, which include visual
rhetoric, typography, spacing
and color just to name a few,
act as the ‘yin’ to the contentual ‘yang’ of a successful
magazine periodical. This
article is meant to serve as
a historical, rhetorical, and
visual analysis of these elements, as used in modern
magazine covers. Its goal is
to better inform any reader
interested in the study of
document production regarding the competitive,
unique and inspiring field of
professional magazine cover
design.
art, he or she will be disadvantaged by not having learned
the cultural and technological
trends that have occured in past
decades and would thereby be
robbed of a deeper satisfaction
that the modern art of cover
design can offer. Likewise, much
as history is known to repeat
itself, such does an evaluation
of the past allow one to predict
future trends and advances in
the field of graphic design.
Magazines were first
birthed as a biproduct of the
spread of newspaper journalism
during the Printing Revolution
of the sixteenth century. 4 While
newspapers have always traditionally served the purpose of
spreading world and local news
S t y l e s ch a n ge, a n d
Cosmopolitan Magazine
to the masses on a daily or
knows that it must
weekly basis, magazines tend to
ch a n ge w i t h t h e m if it
direct themselves toward more
w a n t s t o re m a i n a t o p s e l l i n g w o m e n ’s f a s h i o n
specific audiences and may be
Famed Roman Philosopher
magazine. The above three
published less frequently, such
Cicero once said, “To not know
c o v e rs ( l e f t t o r i g h t )
as on a monthly, bimonthly or
f ro m 1 9 4 9 , 1 9 7 5 , and
what happened before you were
2006 work to illustrate j u s t quarterly basis. The Gentlemen’s
born is to forever remain a child.” h o w d ra s t i c a l l y C o s m o
Quarterly, founded in London in
This quote is applicable to say
h a s a l t e re d i t s c o n t e n t
1731, is widely considered to be
and cover design in its
that if one does not take a mo1 2 4 y e a r s o f e x i s t e n c e . the first publication to use the
ment to examine the history of
term “magazine.” The periodimagazine production and cover
cal ran on a monthly basis and
Previous page and above:
carried a wide range of articles
Fig. 1 | Cosmopolitan Magazine
covers, publication date from left
on topics the writers believed
to right: January 1949, February
the educated public might be
1975, and November 2006.
interested in, from household
To the left:
commodities to Latin poetry. 5
Fig. 2 | Graph displaying the
Printed newspapers and
change in news stand between
1999 and 2008, as calculated by
magazines and printed publiMagazine Publishers of America, Inc.
Sales are displayed as a percentcations continued to
age of previous year’s sales,
spread across Europe
where any number less than 100
A Brief
History
indicates a drop in sales and any
number greater than 100
indicates a gain in sales.
Hal Cohen | ENG 372
3
Brodovitch introduced
European movements
like the Bauhaus, Futurism, and Surrealism to an
unsuspecting American
public.” With these eyecatching artists lending
their work to notorary
magazine publishers, readers soon began to pick up
editions not just for their
content, but for their
covers as well.
To the left:
Fig. 3 | “The Runaway” by
Norman Rockwell, as reprinted on the cover of the
September 1958 issue of
The Saturday Evening Post.
and into the New World throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, but it would not be until
the mid-1930’s that magazine covers
would begin to grow in popular appeal with the birth of modern photojournalism. As Californian writer
Perrin Drum explains in his article
“Eight Years That Changed Magazine History” which was published
in Print Magazine in February 2010,
there were two primary individuals
who led to the magazine industry’s
dynamic change in aesthetic shift:
American painter Norman Rockwell
and Russian photographer Alexey
Brodovitch. “[Brodovitch] started at
Harper’s Bazaar in 1934,” he writes,
“but his influence began to take even
more unconventional shapes in 1936
and kick-started the concept of the
modern-day art director-an idea so
new...While Norman Rockwell was
painting Boy Scouts and soda fountains for The Saturday Evening Post,
The late 1980’s marked
the birth of desktop publishing and digital design,
with the release of MacPaint in 1984 and Adobe
Illustrator the following
year. No longer bound
by the laborious confines
of handmade production, designers were able
to experiment with new
production techniques
and typographical motifs
as new technologies such
as Photoshop began to
surface.6
Like most printed
media, the 21st Century
has proven a worrisome
enigma for magazine
publishers. With the rise
of the World Wide Web
many magazines have
seen a steady decline in
sales over the past decade (see Fig. 2 on the
previous page), met with an
increased reliance on online and print ad placement
over subscription fees as a
method of staying economically viable.
However, the losses
suffered in magazine sales
have been negligible compared to the decline in
newspaper sales. Tony Chambers says that he is hardly
concerned for the future of GQ:
“Our sales have been consistently OK; they undulate.
We’ll have a good year and a
not-so-good year but we’ve
never had a terrible year.”
This retention of magazine
popularity has largely been
due to the medium’s appeal
to niche markets of consumers in addition to its slower
issue turnover rate, which
allows readers to have time
to run out and purchase a
printed copy.
Fig. 4-1
Fig. 4-2
Audience is everything
in the world of professional magazine cover design and production. The interests the magazine’s
target consumer will determine
the content and brand image of the
publication, which in turn dictate the
company’s design philosophy. The
following section will take a closer
look at the covers of three contemporary magazines: GQ, Juxtapoz, and
ally chosen for their popularity and
their contrast in target consumer
and brand image.
But before we can fully
delve into the world of rhetorical
design, we must first identify the
goal of a magazine cover: to gain
the attention of the reader. We
have already talked a bit about GQ,
To the left:
Fig. 3 | Cover page of the
May 2010 issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly Magazine.
Fig. 5-1
for
Spacing
PC World, which have been individu-
Fig. 5-2
Success
but now let’s take a closer look.
In a document designed for an
Gentlemen’s Quarterly is, in the word
American audience, for example,
of art director Tony Chambers, “an
these “power zones” are located in
upmarket men’s magazine” that
the page’s top left corner and span
strives to pave the way as a men’s fash-
down the left and across the top of
ion trendsetter. The May 2010 issue
the page.7 This is because English
cover (see Figure 3) clearly displays
is a Germanic language that is read
the magazine’s image and target con-
from top to bottom, from left to
sumer by placing its product (in this
right. Other documents written in
case a stylish beige two-piece suit, as
Eastern languages, such as Arabic
modeled by American actor Jake Gyl-
and Hebrew, are read from right
lenhaal) by placing Jake in the center
to left and therefore instead have
of the frame above the GQ logo, as-
a power zone spanning from the
suring that it is the first thing that will
page’s top right corner.
be seen by the reader.
design is incredibly popular among
Next, the cover takes advan-
This dual-column page
tage of “power zones,” the areas on
fashion industry cover designers,
the page that the reader is most likely
and can also be seen modeled by
to look at first, in order to attract the
the 1975 and 2006 Cosmopolitan
reader’s attention to the issue’s brand
Magazine covers featured on the
logo and featured article headlines.
previous page (see Figure 1). However,
Above (left two):
Fig. 4 | Cover (Fig. 4-1) and cooresponding feature article (Fig. 4-2) of the
April 2010 issue of Juxtapoz Magazine.
Above (right two):
Fig. 5 | Cover of the May 2010
(Fig. 5-1) and article from the
November 2006 (Fig. 5-2) issues of PC World Magazine.
Hal Cohen | ENG 372
5
t hi s i s f a r f rom the only
m e t h o d o f p ag e o rga n i za t i o n u til iz e d by
m o d e r n m a g azine cover
d e si g n e r s. Ju xtapo z a nd
P C Wo r l d M agazine (see
F i g . 4 a n d 5 ) e xe mpli fy
two radically different
al t er n a t i ve spa ci ng
strategies that fully
disregard the pages’
ver tical
power zones.
Their radical
organizational dissimilarities reflect the two
periodicals’ different utilities
and target audiences.
Juxtapoz Magazine is
just one in an endless list of
contemporary art magazines
that have become a popularized niche market following
the underground art movement of the late 20th Century. It serves, as described
by Collin David of Collectors’
Quest Magazine, “as a chronicle
of the lowbrow / surrealist art
movement since 1994, allowing spectators and participants
alike to watch as the art collective evolves, transforms, and
incorporates more and more
into itself.”8 It should be to little surprise then that both the
cover and innards of Juxtapoz
feature very little in terms
of text, instead choosing to
fill 4/5 of the cover page
with a painting by featured
artist Charlie Isoe and to
leave a mere horizontal strip
for the magazine’s title and
content blurbs (see Fig. 4-3).
Compare this instead
to the April 2010 cover
of PC World Magazine,
which features seven
full rows of text and no
graphics beside two small
images placed far out of
its power zone, at the
bottom of the page.
Typography
There are three ways
in which a user can view
a document: First they
can skim for something
that catches their eye
on the page, such as an
interesting and centered
picture in the case of the
GQ and Juxtapoz covers,
or large red text in the
case of PC World.
Next, they can
scan by looking through
the document for particular information, such as
featured articles and page
numbers. Lastly, if the
document has successfuly
gained the user’s attention, they can settle down
and read the full article.9
PC World’s cover
is not as likely to catch
the eye of a skim-reader,
its publishers know that
its target audience values
the magazine’s full-text
articles instead of graphics and is therefore more
likely to take the time to
scan the magazine’s cover
and read its inner
contents. While Juxtapoz and GQ
rely on their images to draw the
consumer in, PC World relies solely
on its bold red logo to gain the
user’s attention. The color red itself
has a tremendous role in the success of the PC World logo; the
color red can imply value as
a color of emotional intensity or urgency, but is also
likely to attract attention due to its high
Above (top to bottom):
Fig. 4-3 | Juxtapoz logo and cover stories,
as printed on the cover of the April 2010
issue of Juxtapoz Magazine.
Fig. 3-2 | GQ logo, as featured on the home page
o f G e n t l e m e n ’s Q u a r t e r l y M a g a z i n e : w w w. g q . c o m .
Fig. 5-3 | PCWorld logo, as printed on the cover of
the April 2010 issue of PC World Magazine.
contrast with the yellow
background and black body
font.10 Juxtapoz and GQ also
feature eye-catching logos
(see Fig. 4-3 and 3-2) that
stand out as well as provide
more information about the
contents of the magazine. Juxtapoz reads “Art + Culture,”
while GQ reads “Look Sharp
+ Live Smart.” PC World on
the other hand does not have
or need such a blurb due to
the implicit nature of its title.
The font choice of
each logo is also significant
to the image of each cooresponding brand. While all
three logos feature serifed
typeface designs, Juxtapoz’s
is by far the most noticable;
the letters on each word are
capitalized so that there is no
x-height present on the document. This creates a somewhat ‘edgy’ and ‘underground’
look to the typeface, as is its
intention.
Gentlemen’s Quarterly
on the otherhand features a
far less intense typeface. The
GQ logo features a high-saturation didactic red and blue
color scheme. Blessed with an
aesthetically-pleasing abbhreviation, the two round letters
are linked using an exclusion
effect in order to transform
the letters into symbol while
still allowing them to retain
their recognizable shapes.
This roundness, combined
with the contrast of the red
and blue upon the white
background, create an sleek
and somewhat retro rhetorical appeal, as is consistent
with the GQ brand image.
Conclusion
The secret to the
continued success
of the magazine industry lies
within its uncanny ability to
appeal to niche markets of
consumers by identifying
and tending to their stylistic
and contentual wants and
needs. Just as a magazine
depends on providing relevant and enjoyable content
to its readers to survive, so
must it also pay attention to
the principles of design if it
wants to attract consumers
to buy it.
The magazine cover is
the salesperson who gets the
ball rolling. It is the roar of a
Harley Davidson motorcycle,
designed to turn heads and
grab the reader’s attention
long enough to flip through
its pages. The success of the
magazine depends on the
success of its cover, and the
success of the cover depends
on its adherence to and
utilization of the principles of
document design.
Hal Cohen | ENG 372
7
Works Cited
[1] “Number of Magazines by Category, 1999-2007.” American Society of Magazine Editor.
[2] Leslie, Jeremy. “Foreword.” MagCulture: New Magazine Design. London: Lawrence King
[3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] 38-47. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web.
Kimball, Miles A., and Ann R. Hawkins. “Chapter 5: Pages.” Document Design: a Guide for
Technical Communicators. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 126-27 Print.
Drumm, Pekrin. “Eight Years That Changed Magazine Design History.” Print 64.1 (2010):
38-47. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web.
Kimball, Miles A., and Ann R. Hawkins. “Chapter 5: Pages.” Document Design: a Guide for
Manchester and Oxford. Web.
Drumm, Pekrin. “Eight Years That Changed Magazine Design History.” Print 64.1 (2010):
History 24.3 (2006): 387-412. Print.
“Internet Library of Early Journals.” Bodleian Library. Universities of Birmingham, Leeds,
Lawrence King Publishing, 2003. 72-75. Print.
Weber, Johannes. “Strassburg, 1605: The Origins of the Newspaper in Europe.” German
Publishing, 2003. 6-7. Print.
Chambers, Tony. Interview by Jeremy Leslie. MagCulture: New Magazine Design. London:
Magazine Publishers of America, Jan. 2010. Web.
Technical Communicators. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 119-20. Print.
[10] Kimball, Miles A., and Ann R. Hawkins. “Chapter 8: Color.” Document Design: a Guide for
Technical Communicators. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 254-55. Print.
Illustrations
[Fig. 1-1]
Cosmopolitan Covers From 1949. 1949. Photograph. Ad Art Gallery: Cosmopolitan [Fig. 1-2]
Magazine Covers. Images from Nostaliaville. Web.
Cosmopolitan Covers From 1975. 1975. Photograph. Ad Art Gallery: Cosmopolitan Magazine Covers.
Images from Nostaliaville. Web.
[Fig. 1-3] Rachel Bilson Cosmo Cover. 2006. Photograph. Cosmo Cover Gallery. Cosmopolitan Magazine. Web.
[Fig. 2] “The Full Story on Magazine Circulation Vitality.” Circulation Vitality White Paper [Fulton] 14 Sept. 2009: Magazine Publishers of America, Inc. Web.
[Fig. 3] Gentlemen’s Quarterly Magazine Apr. 2010. Print.
[Fig. 3-2] GQ Logo. Digital image. GQ.com. Gentlemen’s Quarterly Magazine. Web.
[Fig. 4] Juxtapoz Magazine Apr. 2010: 0, 55 Print.
[Fig. 5-1, 3] PC World Apr. 2010: 0. Print.
[Fig. 5-2] PC World Nov. 2006. Print.
Hal Cohen | ENG 372
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