Designing a magazine cover is a pretty challenging task. If you are working as a junior designer in an agency you will probably discover soon from the senior colleagues the many things that you have to take into consideration when designing the cover of a magazine. You think you know how to, but you don’t.
You will have as much creativity as you have limitations. You have an approximate space of 8×11 inches which is pretty much to create something beautiful and attractive, but at the same time you also have guidelines that you must follow to avoid confusing the readers and at the same time to give them as much information possible about the contents of the magazine.
Consistency
Most magazines like the magazine layout to be consistent from one edition to another and the same applies to the cover, this is why notorious magazines tend to keep their style for a pretty long time until they change it. This is good if the managers insist on building a strong visual identity, but there are magazines, which I enjoy profoundly, which do the exact opposite and change the style every time a new number is released.
It is true that the magazine logo must be kept the same to ensure a minimum of brand exposure, but the rest of the cover, the typography, page arrangement, style of the cover, photo or illustrations, these can be toyed around with as long as it’s being done with a strategy and not random.
Yes, typography
I often write articles about fonts and typography and I don’t think there’s a need to repeat myself by saying why typography is very important. You will notice in the examples below that typographic hierarchy is important in print as well as in web design.
It is important to show to the reader certain articles that are more important than others and also to create a readable structure within the page with the help of typographic hierarchy. For example, the title of the article about the person or event that is on the front page will most of the times have a bigger font than the rest of the articles.
Also, the color that you use for various headlines and overall text on the page is very important. A big mistake from rookie designers is to put non-contrasting elements on the page. For text to be read, it must be light on a dark background or the other way around. Besides doing this directly through the fonts, you always have to possibility to darken or whiten areas of the illustration or photo in order for the text to be readable.
The easiest way to do this contrast is with black or white text. However, you shouldn’t be afraid of using colors; after all, you are a creative so be creative. Also, there are standards that you must choose.
Any color just won’t do. Most of the times, you will have to use a color palette on the page design, so be sure that you haven’t forgotten about color theory or color schemes. These are very important to create a visually appealing design.
Guidelines
As I previously mentioned, there are certain limitations regarding what you can do with a magazine cover, but let’s not look at them this way and consider them instead guidelines.
For starters, the masthead, or magazine title, should always be the same for branding and advertising considerations. Even if you are changing the layout and using various styles on the cover design, the title of the magazine must remain the same. Its placement can be in front of the subject or behind it, depending on how the editor allows it.
The dateline must also be present. Having the month and year of the publication, alongside with the price, is a must on any magazine.
If you are using a photograph of a person on the cover make sure it is making eye contact. This is a neat trick to attract people’s attention on the news stand.
There must be a main cover line which you must make it stand out with the use of the lovely typography that I’ve mentioned earlier.
A bar code should be present, but you may notice that special subscriber covers remove it completely from the layout.
The cover lines are most of the times created in the same structure, the title in bold font and an explanatory line below it. Instead of bold, a different color can be used, depending on what works better on your background.
The most frequent flashes that you see on magazine covers are “New”, “More” and “Exclusive”. The people are used to these and are attracted by them so their usage can have a positive effect.
A good advice would be to use grids when designing a cover. You must create an organized structure on the page to please the reader, not a chaotic one.
Conclusion
It may seem simple at first, but creating a magazine cover needs a lot of thought put into it. It usually starts with a sketch and after that the layout modifies gradually but not in a dramatic way. Although you might think this process would take just a few minutes, it usually takes hours to get the right result.
As it was promised to you in the article’s title, you also have inspiration in here, magazine covers inspiration that you can observe and see how others created covers and what techniques and elements you can use on your projects too.
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