99% Invisible - 101- Cover Story

Episode Date: February 11, 2014

You know the saying: you can’t judge a book by its cover. With magazines, it’s pretty much the opposite. The cover of a magazine is the unified identity for a whole host of ideas, authors, and designers who have created … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Ideas for magazine design that will blow his mind. Best, cover, ever. Finally, our guide to what readers want. You know the same. You can't judge a book by its cover. With magazines, it's pretty much the opposite. That's Avery Chouffleman. She works here. You can and you should judge a magazine by its cover.

The story behind the cover that everyone is talking about. They want you to. Change your cover, change your life. The cover of the magazine is the unified identity for a whole host of ideas and authors and designers who have created the eclectic array of stories and articles and materials within each issue. And some would argue this identity extends to the reader as well. Magazine covers are very potent. So if you're holding a copy of Vogue, in the moment that you're seen with that, either by yourself or by your peers, then you are a Vogue reader. And this is different than being a Twilight reader or a DaVinci code reader.

A book is a fixed moment in time, whereas a magazine is a constant source of ever-changing content. And that's where the design of a magazine is so challenging. Learn how this old publication got a fresh new look. Magazine covers are a composition of text and visuals that are designed to express a specific identity month after month or a week after week. You've got the logo, you've got the photograph, you've got color, you've got words. The secrets of magazine design, our expert, reveals all. This is Andy. My name is Andy Kells, I blog at coverthing.com, which is a blog all about covers.

He also worked in Creative at Marie Claire, Rolling Stone, and a whole bunch of other magazines, both in the United States and England. So we know as a thing or two about covers. Starting from the top, literally, because that's where the name of the magazine always is. When you see a magazine, the first thing you're asking the readers to do is just identify the brand. That's central.

If that doesn't happen, everything else fails. And then you've got to show them that this is the new issue, the one they don't have yet. I think the best way to do this is with color. The reader might think, oh, the last one, if I recall, was green. This one is blue, so clearly it's different. Then the photograph. Photograph is the thing that creates a really powerful emotional connection with the reader.

You see somebody, you see the eye contact, you recognise them as celebrities. It's a very high level of engagement. But the photograph wasn't always part of the equation. The early magazine covers were essentially illustrated. So you're looking at Norman Rockwell, you're looking at the amazing art that was on the cover of though, Harpers. You're looking at paintings and drawings. And he had a few examples on hand, like this one. Man's action, which has a red-headed woman in a short dress and what appears to be a

bodice tied to some sort of Indian totem pole. But these are paintings. Illustrated, like old movie posters. These are not celebrities. These are just paintings of scenes that might appear in the 60s man's fantasy. Men of the 60s were very imaginative.

And beyond the men's magazines, a lot of major publications actually had cartoon mascots on the cover. Some of them persist today, like the Playboy Bunny, mad magazines, Alfred E. Newman, and the mascot of the New Yorker, the monocled Eustace Tilly. Even UK Vogue had an illustrated mascot, Ms. Exeter, an elegant 50-something woman who had an advice column about being a classy, classy name. An Esquire had Eski, a moust mustachioed skirt chaser in a fedora. And a lot of Esquire covers featured him. Until George Lois came along.

George Lois was the pioneer in the industry. He was the guy who made magazine covers sexy. He revolutionized the cover of Esquire using big bold eye catching photographs. You've probably seen some of these covers, or at least homages to them. He did one of Richard Nixon getting makeup put on him, one of Ed Sullivan wearing a Beatles wig. He did one of a beautiful woman shaving her face and a man putting on lipstick. For the 60s, these were shocking.

Shocking. No more cartoon covers. The crazy thing was that Lois didn't even work for Esquire. My name is George Lois and I never had a role at Esquire. He was an admin. He was behind a lot of the most famous ads of all time. Iconic 60s posters for American Airlines, Xerox, and even political campaigns for candidates like Robert Kennedy and Ed Koch.

Many people who written about the covers called me the author of the Oscar. I was never the author of the Oscar. I just did that covers. In 1962, Harold Hayes, head editor of Esquire magazine, asked Lois to do a cover for him. And as Lois tells the story, Hayes needed a cover from him in three days. You know, he gave me a description of, you know,

20 things in the magazine. And then he said, oh yeah, I went to one of the spread. We have a photograph of Floyd Patterson, the photograph of the sonny list. Floyd Patterson versus Sonny Liston. This was the upcoming heavyweight fight. The issue was going to come out before the fight and everyone was predicting that Patterson would win.

And Lois did a really gutsy thing. Three days later, I delivered them a cover where I showed somebody looked like Floyd Patterson did a really gutsy thing. So there's a good chance that Esquire would be wrong. And this could make the magazine look really bad. So bad. Can you imagine a major publication that predicted the wrong outcome of a huge heavyweight fight? Oh my god, so embarrassing. But Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquare, went along with it, and Lois actually called it.

So in any way, the point is that Paterson got knocked out of every FCA stream, and everybody in America went crazy over the next 400 sold an extra 400,000 copies, at 400,000 copies, on a new stand. I think they would have sold 800,000, how do you get it wrong? And they did cover for the next 19 years. Lois went on to create a catalog of 92 Esquire covers. Most of them just as eye-catching and controversial

as his first. I think that because Joseloyas was like an ad guy, he was able to see the potential of the brand with the widest possible vision. And he was he who ushered in this age of magazine covers, bitning, or sort of a powerful presentation of an idea more than just what happened to be in the magazine.

One big, stark image with little or no text. They look almost like wall posters. And now, many of them are in the permanent collection in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It's radical and amazing work, and of course, you had a lot to deal with. The Vietnam War, the starters, and probably finishes. You know, his Muhammad Ali cover is one of the greatest magazine covers all of all time. Best cover ever.

If you've seen any of Lewis's covers or variations of his covers, it's probably this one. The cover is almost completely white with Muhammad Ali shirtless, pierced all over his body with arrows like a martyr. By refusing military service, there's a conscientious objector because of his new religion. He was sentenced to jail and then he was stripped of all his titles. And he was condemned as a draft doger and even a traitor. And so the idea of this cover was to suggest that he was a martyr to his religion. But the extraordinary thing about this image here is that the martyr they choose to model the

photograph on was a Christian martyr. Specifically, Saint Sebastian as portrayed in oil paintings by Andrea del Castanio. Saint Sebastian, by the way, is also the patron saint of sports. Andy recounts the story as George Lois described it in his book. Mohammed Ali had to get on the phone with his religious leader, Elijah Mohammed. And Mohammed Ali had to explain the painting on which this photograph would be based in excruciating detail. Because Mohammed Ali was concerned about the propriety of using a Christian source for the portrayal of his martyrdom.

And finally, he put George Loewis, who is a non-practicing Greek Orthodox on the phone. After a lengthy theological discussion, Elijah Muhammad gave George Loewis his okay. George excelled and shot this portrait of a dayified man against the authorities. That's a hell of a lot of symbolism. Change your cover, change your life. And then came Cosmo. In 1965, Cosmo Politan ushered in the era of the cover line. The cover line, yes. Cover line, the word.

26 sex positions, we must try this weekend. Cosmo Politan wasn't the first to use text on the cover. But they were the first to use it really provocatively. 26 text positions you must try this weekend. And they set the standard template for what a new stand magazine looks like today. Goal straight through the middle, Caroline's left and right is a traditional doughnut. Donut is not standard industry lingo or anything.

It's not a widely used term, but it's the girl through the middle. You've got the tight range left on one side, the tight range right on the other side, the master's head across the top, perhaps a big line across the bottom. Covers focused on words after the 1960s. That's where the cabaline comes in. That's where you start making very explicit promises to readers. And you take the readers' trust in your brand that you can deliver them. Promises like... 14 things you can do tonight' trust in your brand that you can deliver them. Promises like... 14 things you can do tonight that will save your marriage.

Or... 547 style ideas. 621 ways to get the most out of your look. Seven easy ways to be stressed. Hook them in with the cover lines, located very strategically. There's tremendous debate amongst editors and art directors as to how to maximize the value of the key pieces of real estate of a magazine for uncover. And these key pieces of real estate, very depending on the kind of magazine, celebrity

weeklies always have their big cover lines splashed across the middle and it's yellow. It's always just it's yellow. Because yellow pops on new stand and you know it's got a very high color value, a very low tonal value. In fact the whole weekly market relies on yellow. If you look at us weekly people, life and style in touch actually that's not true. Life and style have taken the yellow special way

and now the type is now just white as they're trying to present themselves as a slightly more fashion orientated celebrity news weekly. And for the more lifestyle oriented, the location of the most captivating cover lines is the so-called hotspot. The hotspot immediately underneath the logo on the left-hand side. Or the right-hand side. Well, it depends on which country you're in. Much of this has to do with the way in which magazines are racked in the stands.

Magazines are very much designed around their racks. Here in the UK, a lot of magazines are shuffled. Only the left edge is revealed. So in England, you get most of your headlines on the left side or the leading left edge. British invasion, style from across the pond. Whereas in the USA, then there are you have a waterfall presentation

where you only see the top third. So we stick our best cover lines as high and close to the logo as we can on either side. US publications have many more cover lines than those in the UK. And that's purely because of the way in which they stack to retail. So magazines that don't rely on newsstand sales look very different from magazines that do. Titles like the Atlantic Bloomberg, Time, the New Yorker, these mostly function on subscriber

models. News-oriented magazines don't use the hotspots the same extent because they're not dependent on newsstandsile. They are a little more lowest-esque big photographs and pictures with not as much text. New Yorker covers Harkin' Back to a pre-1960s illustration model. Except when you encounter the New Yorker on the newsstand, in which case there's a little flap on the leading left edge with a list of contents.

Finally, our guide to what readers want. Big pictures by themselves just don't sell like they used to. It's about volume of content. Magazine's are expensive on Newstand. There's a real job in reassuring readers that there's plenty to read inside. Hence the illegible cornucopia of cover lines on Esquire today. Yeah, okay, let's have a look. Esquer 2013.

Yeah, there's a very foxy picture here of Megan Fox. Check this. Now I like this cover. I like this cover by the fact that you can barely read the cover lines. They're so tiny. They're just saying, relax guys, there's loads of stuff in here. That design is the work of David Kirk-Rido. Learn how this old publication got a fresh new look. My name is David Kirk-Rido and I'm the design director for Esquire Magazine.

The guy behind today's Esquire covers, which look nothing like Lois'. I'm responsible for the look of the magazine from Cover to Cover. My job is to pick photographers, pick all the images, pick the typography, pick the size of the typography, pick the color of the typography. The key word here is typography. My choice in typography definitely sets the tone for the covers without a doubt. Curcurrito's style is loaded with words. You design cover magazine, express.

So overloaded that it explodes the doughnut. Cover everyone's life. Reader, secrets dial. Text is all over the cover in front of the celebrity. Behind the celebrity, handwritten, scrolled on the sides. Much of it, just completely illegible. A lot of text, yes, in the sense that there's an overwhelming

amount of text to illustrate that we have a ton of material inside the magazine. So much material that we can't possibly show it all to you on the cover even though we'll try. The text and the image, we've ended out of each other in such a way that the words almost become the image. What we've been doing is kind of overwhelming your senses with both the photography and the typography combined together.

It's been a radical kind of thing on the newsstand. And this is S-squares way of standing out from all the other magazines on the rack, but they don't stand out in the same way Lois' covers did in the 60s. We're a little more formulaic, but, yeah, we don't have the ability to do exactly what he did back in the day

if that's making any sense. It's hard to replicate designs from the 60s because the audience is not from the 60s. I think people are less shocked today than they were in the past. I think it's much harder to shock people. I think we've become so desensitized to imagery that is really hard, but it can still be done.

I don't know. What's shocking now? Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.? Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. So Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, it is celebrity sell. You know, celebrity nine out of 10 times. I mean, we've been with that model for a really long time. Lois is not so certain that this is the way to get attention. Magazine's have always played its safe quote and quote by showing a famous person. Oh,

wow, that's going to touch people, right? And that kind of works if you're only, you have to be the only magazine in the world, but there's 150 magazines trying to choose to study your flavor amongst each month. George Lois is not amused. What these balloons have done before, since, you know, when everybody's done is, I mean, look, you don't have to know what you think about magazines or about anything.

Only have to do it, have a pair of eyes. You go to a new stand and you take the glance at them. They will be incredibly inspired by me. And they work sucks. Infer George Lois, the solution is George Lois. I mean, at the station, look like my club is. But according to David Cercorito, there's a reason they don't. There are certain rules to to putting a

magazine cover together. You know, you want your logo at the top, a picture of a celebrity looking directly into the camera. You want to put your most important cover line, your words on the upper left hand side and the upper right hand

side. And and to be quite honest, you know, when everybody follows the same set of rules, everybody looks the same. Kirkorito is messed with the standard layout, but he mostly sticks to the formula. Because this formula works. Or it has been working for a long time. The fact remains right now is that people are not buying

a new standard like they're used to. They really aren't. You know, magazine sales, a new standard falling. You know, people are no longer in the habit or even have the need to wander into a news agent on a random basis and just pick up a magazine. They'll click on a magazine. You know, George, I've no doubt when he's been on your radio show, he would be saying that all you have to do is put a really ass tearing idea out there on a great photograph

and really shock the socks off people and everything will be okay. Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what he said. When you look at a magazine from 20 feet away, it should knock you on your ass. It's the same color. I mean, you know, with Infrasnac clonies, it's the wannabe stars, it's star of the service center. And they were all surrounded with five or six or seven or eight or nine ten blurbs, you know, unreadable blurbs.

But it also was terrible about the magazines, because the content of the magazine first or the layout and the design of every magazine these days Every page looks like a page from the internet. It's jammed. It's jammed with what young people think is information. It's a chick. There's a white space. It's still taking a 19-minute open in the water, shooting at no place, you're trying to stop agent. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Trouffleman, Sam Greenspan, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio, KLW in San Francisco, and produced out of the offices of Arxon, a brilliant architecture firm that takes special pride in their collaborative

approach located in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars, Sam tweets at Sam listens, Avery tweets at Truffleman, but if you're interested in listening to the first 100 episodes of this program, each one of polished little gem of a radio story. Go to 99pi.org. Laying an ontop today. Radio Tapio. From PRX.