Week on week, regular magazine buyers would scarcely notice a change in the look of their favourite front covers. But rewind the years and we’d see big shifts in style, content, brand positioning and the strength of the sales pitch.
Browsing a garage sale in a sleepy corner of Kent this summer, I came across a rich seam of vintage magazines in surprisingly pristine condition. It was like digging up Anglo Saxon gold. There were some 30 magazines from the fifties to the seventies, whose covers, un-spiced with hard-sell coverlines, you’d be proud to stick in a frame and hang on the wall – the New Yorker, Nova, Radio Times, Cosmopolitan, Time. They were a reminder that Darwinism works in magazines too – that covers adapt to meet changing times, and only the fittest survive.
As one of the judges who helped select the shortlist for this year’s Maggies Cover Awards, my job was to examine a pack of new covers from across the magazine spectrum. It was the perfect opportunity to step back and observe how covers have changed to meet the needs of 21st century readers – and survive in the furnace of today’s competitive markets.
The overall standard of entries was high, certainly higher than it would have been 20 years ago, a sign that magazines in all markets have raised their game, that covers are no longer the hit-and-miss-affair they used to be. This high standard is a testament to the importance placed on the front cover in every market today. Twenty years ago, it was common for an editor and art editor to go into a huddle and knock out a cover on a Friday afternoon, anxious to hit the pub for a weekend-starts-here pint. Today, choosing the right cover has become a key publishing decision taken not by editors in glorious, dangerous isolation, but after an approval process involving several members of the publishing team.
Weekly celebrity
So how have covers changed over 20 years? The valuable weekly celebrity market, which was in its infancy in the early nineties, has added much high drama and typographical noise - and two of the Maggies entries illustrated this. Heat sold a Peter Andre exclusive with the gigantic coverline: ‘Pete Reveals All’, followed by the sub-line ‘The lies, her new man, and why I never LIKED Jordan’. And Reveal splashed the words: ‘They’ve Blown It!’ across pictures of Danielle Lloyd, Kerry Katona and Jordan. Reveal Editor Jane Ennis says: “The big difference with celeb mags is that today’s covers are much more aggressive, right in your face, really shouty. And this isn’t confined to magazines. You see it on TV, even in the Guardian and the Times – it’s a change that’s taken place right across the media. Celeb magazines are showing the tabloid papers how to do it these days – it’s not unusual to see Reveal’s coverlines repeated in a tabloid two weeks later. You can’t afford to be clever with coverlines today - clever verbal tricks are a waste of time - you have to say what the story is. We run very direct stories with short coverlines, always news-led, exclusives-led, gossip-led.”
Classic weeklies
While the celeb magazines have developed a strong news agenda on their covers, the mainstream ‘classic’ weeklies like Woman’s Own and Best have moved their cover subjects from Home and Away and Neighbours (early nineties) through Coronation Street and EastEnders (early 2000s) and now focus on daytime TV hosts like Coleen Nolan and Sherrie Hewson, a reflection of where their more conservative audience has moved in recent years as the classic women’s market splintered into celebrity and real life. Design-wise, this market also had to raise its cover production standards to stay competitive, and ‘classic’ weeklies covers have progressed to glossy, heavy paper stock and use fluoro colours.
Glossy monthlies
In consumer monthly markets, the women’s sector invariably puts celebrities on covers, something that would have been considered cheap or risky 20 years ago, when the cover model still reigned on the front page. A look back at Marie Claire covers in the early nineties shows a procession of close-up head shots of top models like Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and Isabella Rossellini hogging a very formulaic front page. Although Marie Claire introduced celebrities in the late nineties, the catalyst for change in this market was Glamour, launched in 2001, with its busy-busy covers - 10 coverlines on an A5 page – and its diverse range of celebrity models. Today, even the top end titles are flirting with mainstream British celebrities instead of their traditional diet of airbrushed Hollywood A-listers. Once it would have been unthinkable for Harpers, Elle and Vogue to slum it with a British reality TV star on their covers – but they have all done just that in the last two years. “The monthlies are now moving into what was previously weeklies territory,” says Reveal’s Jane Ennis. “It used to be Hollywood all the way, but they can now put Cheryl Cole on the cover without advertisers dying of horror.”
Cover stars apart, many of these once demure titles have responded to the Glamour effect by moving to a much less formulaic, more fluid, busier design – and a popular device recently has been the extensive use of freehand type on the cover to give a more personalised, informal approach. One of the Maggies entries, British Vogue, was a good example, with the word ‘Wonderful’ writ large across the cover in elegant script. Another example was Elle’s Lily Allen cover that displayed the main coverline ‘London Calling’ in a graffito-like typeface. Watch for more typographical magic as designers look for innovative ways to shout above newsstand noise.
Men’s market
In the men’s market, the launch of Loaded in 1995 forced other titles to adopt a universal tits-and-bums cover approach. It’s fascinating today to look back at some of GQ’s saucy nineties covers – like Elle MacPherson cupping her naked breasts in August 1996. But the launch of two no-holds-barred flesh-flaunting weeklies, Nuts and Zoo, in 2004 and the resulting catastrophic effect on the mainstream monthlies, brought about an urgent covers rethink on some titles. GQ won this year’s award for best overall cover in the Maggies (voted for by 40,000 members of the public) with what fellow judge Peter Jackson called a “very cool, most elegant” cover with gold and cream tones and featuring Sienna Miller curled up in a huge chair - a cover with only two coverlines. And FHM took the award in the lifestyle category with a non-revealing shot of singer Pixie Lott against a huge amplifier to flag up their Music Issue. It was a far cry from FHM’s Gail Porter cover in June 1999; the coverline said it all – ‘She’s Stunning – And She’s Nude!’
Design advances
The FHM cover was a reminder that one of the big changes over the past 10 years has been a leap in designers’ skill levels. Armed with more potent design software with the introduction of In Design, and driven by publishing economics to do their own retouching and Photoshop work, the talent in many magazine art departments today would rival that of any ad agency. A good example among the Maggies entries was Metal Hammer’s Slayer cover, the entertainment category winner, a gruesome stack of four portraits each with different facial trauma. The Metal Hammer art team used a combination of ceramic human skulls and a prosthetic make-up artist to produce a cover that, true to the brand, shocked, disgusted - and impressed.
These strong creative skills are being used on magazines where, with almost every issue, covers have to convey a difficult abstract idea. Focus magazine’s Maggies entry illustrated their cover story about overpopulation with a shot of the earth, taken from space, on which a ‘Sorry, We’re Full’ label had been nailed. But the award in the specialist category went to New Scientist for a cover selling a story about the earth’s dwindling oil reserves. The world is shown being crushed on top of a lemon squeezer to extract the last few drops of the black stuff. It was beautifully simple and communicated the idea instantly to newsstand grazers. This ‘issue’ cover has become a regular feature of many modern magazines in the news, science, computer and business sectors. Marketing Week, the winner of the Maggies trade category, offered a good example. Their cover story on guilt marketing showed a close-up of a young woman’s scarlet nail varnished fingers sliding a chocolate bar into her scarlet-lipsticked mouth. And another entry from the resourceful ShortList gave soccer star Carlos Tévez a Che Guevara beret and turned his portrait into a bold Warhol-style print to sell their story on the Manchester City revolution.
Typographical covers
One of the significant developments in recent cover design has been the greater use of the typographical cover, where words, not images, do the selling. Wired has made this kind of cover a strong brand identifier, often combining a simple illustration with dominant type. Wired’s Maggies winning cover in the technology category combined the Superman logo with the simple coverline: You, Upgraded. Though there’s nothing new about the typographical approach (Time famously filled a sixties cover with the words ‘Is God Dead?’), they are becoming very popular because they have newsstand impact and can signal surprise or a special issue. A recent Gardener’s World cover relegated plants to the background to proclaim its Q & A Special in huge type, and many computer magazines have found this the best way to cut through newsstand din to communicate a technical idea.
Impact of retail changes
Some cover changes are driven by developments in the retail environment. The growth of supermarket sales and the widespread use of waterfall racking have led to a re-think on the positioning of key coverlines. Today’s hotspot is no longer the top left-hand corner; it’s now the top third of the cover, the part visible on supermarket shelves. The home interest market has made good use of this, and Elle Deco’s main coverline in September – ‘New Season, New Start’ sitting above the main image and below the logo, is one example. Many of the Maggies shortlisted covers used the same device; BMX Mag’s Photo Issue coverline occupied a similar can’t miss position, as did Autosport’s coverline about a crisis at McClaren, placed just beneath (and larger than) the magazine’s title.
While the technical prowess of designers has changed the quality of today’s covers, Rhoda Parry, editor of Country Homes & Interiors, says there has been a change in the way magazines regard the emotional value of a cover. “Today we use the cover to generate a feeling. There has to be an emotional significance to our covers. We create this by producing a strong seasonal sense. There’s blossom, sunshine, the glow of autumn. Five to ten years ago, this wasn’t happening. Magazines like ours are about creating a dream - a dream of living in the country - and today’s covers have to offer readers more than a room set.”
Andy Cowles, director of editorial development at IPC Media, says that increased competition has pushed editorial teams to up their game and that the key elements on modern covers are ‘brand’ and ‘content’. “The brand is established by colours, typography, choice of image or celebrity and the tone of the coverlines, and enormous strides have been made to achieve brand consistency, issue after issue,” he says. “But the surprise element, the reason people buy, is the content. Take People magazine in the US. Its design is neutral every week, but it’s all about access to big celebrities before anybody else. So when they get Tiger Woods’ wife to talk, as they did in September – that story becomes the cover.”
Cowles says different criteria operate in the weeklies real life sector, where the cover design – the mechanism that delivers its extraordinary human stories – has become important. “The optimum number of coverlines on a real life title is seven,” he says. “But Chat’s design enables it to run one more than that, giving it a real advantage, one more hook to pull readers in.”
Cowles says that creating today’s magazine covers is all about ‘proving the price.’ “The cover has to demonstrate that the magazine is worth the money. That’s the challenge in markets where there is a lot of price activity. Every week, when readers pick up Now for £1.40, in a market where there are cheaper magazines, everything about the cover has to say: it’s worth it.”
Special interest sector
Perhaps the biggest change in covers has come in the special interest sector. IPC Media’s creative director Brett Lewis says that the web has played an enormous part in this change. “Readers no longer have to buy magazines to find out, for instance, about mountain bikes,” he says. “They can Google ‘mountain bikes’ and get a massive amount of information for free - some of it poor, some of it good enough. It’s free versus paid-for, and we have to make paid-for magazines value for money – and most importantly demonstrate that on the cover.
“Today, we have to make everything on the cover relevant to the brand. Every image, coverline, colour, typeface. And the words have to be to the point, meaningful. A coverline from 15 years ago on Golf Monthly - Fairway to Heaven – would be too generic today, it doesn’t mean anything. Today it would have to be much more specific.”
Lewis says that readers’ expectations have changed a lot. “If you put a cover of any magazine from 1995 up against one of today’s covers, you would see a huge difference in the quality and relevance of the coverlines and the quality of the image. Magazines used to have a lot of vague, generic coverlines and no brand values coming through. All that has changed.”
Gimmicks
In comparing yesterday’s covers with today’s, it’s impossible to ignore some of the gimmicks – lenticular covers, talking covers, 3D relief covers, augmented reality covers, covers studded with Swarovski crystals. We’ll continue to see these as one-off marketing tactics, but it’s unlikely that smart-covers will become the norm. “I get very excited when I see Grazia and Empire with their interactive issues and lenticular covers,” says Matt Swaine, editor of Bauer’s Trail magazine. “On Trail it is unlikely ever to happen because there isn’t the money in the market to spend on this kind of device, and I also don’t think it means a great deal to the readers. We’ll be sticking with covers that inspire and make the reader want to get out on the hill more.”
All change: the app
The real change is already with us in the shape of the iPad app version of magazines, perhaps the logical alternative to the old-fashioned paper mag. “The iPad is a real game-changer,” says Brett Lewis. “With a digital product, the cover no longer has to sell a magazine’s content on a newsstand. Readers will be buying into the brand, and instead of a traditional cover, we need to develop a new version of a ‘first page’ to suit each brand. An NME ‘cover’ might include a video of a band performing their new album. On a boating title, readers will want to see boats on the move; if it’s motoring, they will want to see a featured car in action.”
One day soon, we may think of magazines in terms of BP and AP – before and after the Pad. For many years, the traditional paper cover has provided us with a mirror of society, a snapshot of our culture. Covers have reflected our fickle tastes in celebrity, they’ve shown us our fears, passions and desires. Covers have demonstrated our sensitivity to subtle brand values, they’ve shown us a society hungry for the social currency of gossip, instant gratification, easy ways to achieve difficult things. They’ve also shown how far the goalposts of taste and acceptability have shifted. Today’s slick cover design demonstrates our impatient, at-a-glance culture, the importance to us of colour and impact.
When today’s artefacts are dug up in the future, there will be nothing more illuminating than magazine covers to demonstrate the values of our world. Jordan’s boobs, tantric sex, free gift flip-flops, tragic tales of everyday folk, Cars of the Year, minimalist room sets…
In slightly fading fluoros, today’s culture will all come shining through.
