When I attended MagNet 2019 in Toronto this spring, a session with the Reader’s Digest art director, John Montgomery, finally helped me understand a trend in cover design that had been nagging at me: Why is everyone running tiny cover lines? I understand the appeal of a strong image—that’s been my calling card since I started designing award-winning covers for Equinox at the start of my career. I understand running the main cover line as big as possible, keeping in mind the hierarchy of information. But I’ve always felt that secondary and tertiary lines needed to be seen from a certain distance to give a magazine as much of a chance of grabbing that fleeting attention from a newsstand viewer.
SkyNews is a great newsstand example. As a niche magazine and one without the money to spend on prime newsstand real estate (racks at the cash register, front of the shelves in the magazine areas), we are routinely placed low or high and at the back. Why wouldn’t we have bigger secondary cover lines in the areas where we peek through the stacks?
The answer? It all comes down to online representation of the cover, whether on a magazine’s site, social media or through digital magazine sellers. The cover icons are miniscule, so there’s really no point in having mid-sized headlines when all a potential online buyer will see is the cover artwork, the masthead and the main sell line. Thank you, John!
