Mr. Magazine

So what is the formula for good cover design? Well guess what, there is no such thing regardless what some may tell you. The variables are way too many and what makes one issue sells more than the other depends on the many variables that will need more than this space to list. However, one variable I know will work every time is that of repetition. The number one selling magazine on the newsstand per issue Cosmopolitan has been doing it for over 40 years. Use cover lines, with same themes in the same location. Men’s Health is doing the same. Some may say those two magazines are cluttered with cover lines (by the way, I call them sell lines), and I say but those cluttered covers sell magazines. We are in the business of designing covers to hang on a museum wall, we are in the business of selling magazines. However, if you want to be cluttered, you need to do so in all the right places. The upper left-hand corner is the most important real estate on a magazine cover… you ignore it and buyers will ignore you. Hip Hop Weekly uses the cluttered approach on its cover in all the wrong places… compare those three covers and judge for yourself…none will win an award for design, but two out of three will sell very well on the newsstand. You want to bet which two? Drop me a note.

As you can see from the pictures above, good cover design repeats itself every now and then. Esquire has a history of great cover designs and now you have the opportunity to see all the covers of Esquire from 1933 until today by clicking here. I was browsing these covers this morning and the image on the November 1989 cover looked so familiar in its design to a magazine that I’ve just bought. Not to issue rush judgments, I reached into my stack of magazines for this month, and lo and behold the cover design of this month’s GQ looked a lot like the Nov. 1989 Esquire cover. Judge for yourself. By the way, I have always used Esquire’s covers in my classes as a great example of great men’s magazine cover designs together with those of Vogue’s as an example of great women’s magazine cover designs.

That was the first thing that came to my mind as my colleague Mark Dolan at the Department of Journalism (University of Mississippi) commented on the major disconnect which exists between the most journalism faculty’s published research and what goes on in real life newsrooms and television stations.

We were debating how many times we ever heard an editor or publisher refer to an article in Journalism Quarterly or Journalism Monographs (two major publications in journalism education that help faculty get tenured if they publish in them) when they meet with you or talk to you about the business.

It never happens.

The opposite is true with almost any other profession. Doctors refer to the New England Journal of Medicine every time they talk about their research, so do scientists when they refer to Nature magazine. And then come the journalists. We try to debate and analyze the most obscure things that bring our industry no benefit.

I still remember that day in 1985 when I presented my first research on the survival rate of magazines and the looks I received from my academic colleagues. They thought I am the anti Christ. Writing about things that are not historical in nature, which do not analyze the nature of content of the coverage of some war in some magazine, or some women’s issues in some non-women’s magazines—the list goes on and on. From my early career days, I promised myself to make all my research relevant to the industry I love and teach about. From that summer of ’85, I started directing all my work to the industry rather than my colleagues. All my books, all my articles, my web site and now my blog aim to answer ‘what is in it for me, the reader, the publisher, the editor and the art director’. The industry needs academia to be on the forefront of the future—to be learning from our past, not living in it.

When I read some of my colleagues’ writings and discoveries for things that have been taking place for years, I can’t help but to wonder why our industry leaders do not use our research in their works and daily discussions. We can’t continue this disconnect with the industry. Yes, we are academia, but we should be in the service of our students first and the industry second. It can be done without having to sacrifice one on the alter of the other.

Our magazines, newspapers, the entire media field is screaming for help. Do not bury your heads in the sand and pretend that it does not matter to you. You and your relevant research are needed now more than ever.

“And a witness from their own testified,” so goes an old Arabic proverb. And so does Walter E. Hussman publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal today about the reasons newspapers are sinking rather than growing. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is one of few, very few, newspapers that does not offer free content to its readers and in fact, send readers back from the web to the paper. An excellent road map for anyone who is interested in seeing their paper not only survives but also thrives. Check it here.

For years I have been telling my students and my clients that the Visual Impact in Print (the VIP factor) depends on marrying the photography with the typography to create a visual impact that will stop you and make you pick up the magazine. Well, today while scanning the newsstands I found a great example of how not to achieve that impact. In fact it was just the opposite. The cover of the new special from Cook’s Illustraded magazine on Summer Grilling & Entertaining stopped me in my tracks for the complete wrong reason. Summer grilling screams the name and berry pie screams the picture… My brain kept showing me images of a grill and barbecue and my eyes kept showing me a delicious cold pie ready to eat…confused by the mixed messages I started to walk away, but then I remembered it is a first issue that I need to add to my collection plus, I thought, it will make a great blog on what NOT to do with your magazine cover. Well check the cover for yourself. It is grilling below this blog…