Magazine Printing - Great Magazine Cover Design = Success

Published by Glen Grimditch, Ph.D. in Publishing, 8 months 1 day 3 hours 14 minutes 59 seconds ago

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Four-one thousand, three-one thousand, two-one thousand, one-one thousand...Times up! These four seconds are probably largest determinant of the success of your magazine. It's the amount of time you have to convince the potential reader to pick up your magazine instead of all the others available. Did you win or lose?

It doesn't seem quite fair with all those man-hours spent designing the cover, agonizing over which photographs and background to use, composing all the cleaver headlines, and finally, the seemingly endless meetings conducted to choose the final cover design for magazine printing.

The magazine cover is the most important part of magazine printing in terms of the consumer deciding to pick up, read, and purchase the magazine. In the long run, it can be the difference between the success or failure of a magazine.

The cover serves two vitally important functions. Firstly, it conveys consumer recognition or branding of the magazine. Secondly, it creates interest and draws attention to the magazine, increasing the likelihood that the it will become an impulse buy at the newsstand. It must be attractive, and accurately reflect the magazine's content.

There are four primary components of the cover design: typography, photography, headlines and graphic design.


Typography, or the type and size of the fonts used, is important to create an esthetically pleasing cover. The masthead must be consistent from issue to issue to "brand" the magazine and create loyalty among its readers. In addition, the fonts of the masthead and the headlines must complement each other to create a cohesive cover. The photographs used on the cover must be crisp and clear, and attract the potential reader's attention. These photographs will change each issue, and are very important artistically speaking for the cover's success.

The headlines must be well written to create curiosity and interest among those who view it. It's much easier discussing the attributes of a great headline than to write one. But the headline should be written from the customer's point of view, so that a potential buyer seeing the headline would be compelled to pick up the magazine, and purchase it to find out more about the topic.

Finally, graphic design is the process by which all three of the components described above are combined into one seamless entity. A perfect cover would create an irresistible urge within the customer's mind to reach out, pick up the magazine, and read and purchase it.


The individuals responsible for writing the magazine covers located at the supermarket check-out lines are experts at this. Study these covers and ask yourself what makes you want to pick up and read these magazines. Utilize those techniques to create your own magazine cover design for magazine printing. The best method to insure that you have designed a fantastic cover is to let your customers decide which of several cover designs they like best before magazine printing starts. Several cover designs should be made and sent to a statistically significant sample of your current customers. Ask them to choose the best cover and why they liked it. Designing a multiple choice survey, will make it easy for them to respond, takes less time to complete, and will result in better response rate.

This data should be used to choose which cover goes on the current issue and, just as important, to use these principles to design better covers on subsequent issues. By following these guidelines, you've just established a program of continuous improvement so your covers should start out good and improve incrementally over time, helping to ensure the long-term success of your magazine.

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