Magazine & Newsletter Covers - Design Considerations for Editors

The cover is the first impression a potential reader gets of a magazine, newsletter or journal. His or her reaction to the cover will decide whether your product will be bought or read.

In this article I mainly discuss covers for products sold from magazine racks. However you can apply most of my remarks to periodicals that will be delivered by the postal service or sent as ezines.

The primary business purpose of the cover is to get potential readers to pick it up – the first stage in the buying process. Whatever goes on the cover must be judged by this simple criterion: will it induce the reader to reach for the product?

Looks therefore are secondary. But any halfway decent designer will know how to fulfill the business purpose and, at the same time, make the cover look good.

A cover has five main elements:

• Logo-name
  
  
  
• Format
  
  
  
• Cover-images
  
  
  
• Cover-lines
  
  
  
• Colour
  
  
  

Get all five right and you’ll have a product that stands out and has irresistible pick-me-up appeal.

The logo-name
This is the name I have for the title that appears on the cover. It usually consists of just the name in a special font. I call it a logo-name, because it is the main identifier of the product and, like all logos, must be memorable and instantly recognizable.

Make it easy to read. The simpler, the better as simple shapes are more understandable, more memorable and easier to recognize. This is especially true where there are other factors that identify the product, such as its format or the images on the cover. A logo-name rich in graphics, in which your designer has ripped loose on the font shapes, should only be used for periodicals, such as academic journals, which do not have images on their covers.

Have space around the logo-name. It must be displayed in its own space because if it is surrounded by a lot of other matter its importance as an identifier will be reduced.

The position of the logo-name on the cover will depend on how it is to be distributed. If you are producing a commercial product that will be displayed on a magazine rack then the logo-name should be on the top-left corner of the cover, so that it will be visible when other magazines overlap it on the stand. If you are producing a newsletter that will be delivered by mail or email, the position of the logo-name is not so crucial and some variation is possible, depending on your readers’ expectations.

The cover format
The format should be standardized because, like the logo-name, it is an identifier. Indeed a standardized cover will make the product quickly recognizable, which is vital for a commercial magazine. Standardization also makes the cover easier to produce.

However do not turn the format into a straitjacket. Allow your designer to depart from it where it makes sense from the point of view of the primary business purpose of the cover – to get the potential reader to pick up the magazine.

Cover images
These are the eye-catchers. The pictures on the cover must grab attention and arouse curiosity. You should use different images from issue to issue – to distinguish the issues from each other – but at the same time the images must be stylistically the same in order to identify the magazine and set it off from other titles.

Cover-lines
The words on the cover exist to draw the reader into the issue. They are perhaps the most important element of the cover.

Cover-lines must therefore be intriguing, arouse curiosity, and convey messages about interesting content. Above all they must be capable of being understood with a high-speed scan. So:

• Keep them simple – readers only care about what they say not how fancy they look;
  
  
  
• Make them long enough to get the message across;
  
  
  
• Use lower case as it saves space and reads faster;
  
  
  
• Don’t use block capitals because a whole line of them is difficult to read; and
  
  
  
• Don’t give initial capitals to all the words or you will be forcing the reader’s eye to jump up and down for the whole length of the line.
  
  
  

You also need to take the viewer’s distance into account. A product sold from a magazine-rack needs large cover-lines so that it is visible from far away. This does not matter if your product will be delivered in a mail-wrapper or viewed on a monitor.

Because they should not compete with the cover images, black or white cover-lines are best – which brings us to the final element: colour.

Colour
Use a colour for your cover that makes it stand out from the crowd. Look at rival titles in the locations where yours will be sold and choose a colour that prevents your cover from disappearing among the rest. If rival magazines have gaudy colours, try black and white.

View in context
Finally, make up a dummy and examine your cover design in the context in which your targeted buyer will see it.

You could:
(a) place the dummy among other products in a magazine-rack;
(b) put it on a coffee table among plenty of other magazines; and
(c) hide the dummy in your in-box or in a pile of junk mail.

Does the dummy stand out? Does it have that irresistible pick-me-up appeal? Is the title clearly visible and recognizable? Does the cover-line for the main story grab you?

The answers will be staring you and your designer in the face.