Journal of Magazine and New Media Research, 2002

Where Do You Put the Cover Lines?

Gerald Grow
Florida A&M University
ggrow@longleaf.net

Sidebar to "Magazine Covers and Cover Lines: An Illustrated History,"
Journal of Magazine and New Media Research, 2002.

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While a small number of supremely confident magazines announced themselves through huge, striking poster covers through the '40s, other magazines valued the utility of cover lines in attracting an audience. They carried on an extended series of experiments on how to utilize cover lines--especially how to combine them with illustrations. What follows is an overview of what those experiments produced.

Outside the Box The simplest method for combining pictures with cover lines is to keep them in separate areas of the covers, a solution that has proved effective for more than a hundred years. From around 1890 to 1920, many magazines used highly segmented covers: A box contained the title, another box contained the picture, a third box contained cover lines or other publication data. Keeping text and pictures separate simplifies the printing process and it eliminates the difficulties that can arise from printing type over a picture. Many magazines of this period featured large illustrations framed inside boxes, with cover lines outside the box--usually at the bottom, as illustrated by this Hog Breeder from 1933. Some magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post, eliminated the box from around the picture, leaving small cover lines across the bottom. One style of illustration surrounded the picture with an aura of white which, when it met the white of the blank page, created the illusion of a full bleed. Cover lines could be placed on the page so that they appeared to be on the white areas of the illustration.

Box inside Printers faced difficulties in placing text on top of an illustration, unless they made a separate run through the press after the first run was dry. To get around this, knockouts were used to create boxes inside an illustration, into which type could be placed. Some magazines began using cover lines in more than one position: In this Liberty from 1936, the colorful, dynamic illustration now shares space not only with the small cover lines at the bottom, but part of the actual picture has been covered by a yellow box with large cover lines in it. It is not difficult to imagine the struggle illustrators faced as they competed for cover space with such innovations as knockouts for cover lines.

Text Columns on the Cover Another solution, which has appeared in many forms over the decades, is to create a colored vertical column for cover lines alone. Esquire used this approach during the '30s and '40s, as did this 1934 issue of the venerable fashion magazine, Delineator. Magazines have used considerable ingenuity in creating a column on their covers; on the 1921 Designer, a curtain is lifted to reveal a dark backstage, onto which white type appears. Pep! a risque magazine from 1929, creates a red cover column by the simple expedient of cutting a tall, narrow photograph into the red of the cover, leaving the rest for the title and cover lines. Physical Culture employed a text column on the cover throughout the '30s, using it in a flexible manner to adapt to the illustration. In this adventurous magazine, illustrations frequently overlapped the color column that held the cover lines, making the cover more of an integrated whole. Coronet adopted a method for keeping the table of contents on the cover, yet making room for a picture. Two column widths were reserved for the logo and picture, with a third column width dedicated to the tall, narrow listing of contents, set off against a different background color. Most magazines placed the column of cover lines on the left or right border, but Wall Street Magazine from 1941 shows that Delineator's placement was not unique.

Any magazine that used cover lines could adopt the text-column approach for a single issue now and then, as Good Housekeeping did in February of 1933, in a variation its usual poster covers featuring cute drawings of children. In one of the experiments of the highly experimental Mademoiselle from 1937, cover lines appeared in a narrow column on the far left--turned sideways. In an experimental mood, Vogue produced this unusual text column for the April 15, 1943 cover by simulating a torn photo. (The edge of the magazine was unintentionally cut off when it was scanned by the seller.) The result is at once artistically exotic and typographically pragmatic. A tilted yellow box completes the cover lines with a little shout. Notice that Vogue, a leader during the '20s and '30s in using poster covers without cover lines, began using extensive cover lines by the 1940s.

Text in Zones Many magazines adopted a recurring cover format that regularly featured a column of cover lines. The Commentator from 1937 shows a cover combination still widely used today -- logo, picture, and cover lines, each in a separate, horizontal zone on the cover. Early magazines tended to place these zones into separate boxes, but later designers eliminated many of the confining and decorative lines on covers--though this example retains two. The "zoning" method appeared in many kinds of magazines; for example, a 1937 College Humor, which sported a large humorous illustration and extensive cover lines in a separate zone at the bottom of the cover. A McCall's from 1939 simplifies the layout to two zones -- the top third for logo and cover lines, the bottom two thirds for a bleed photo. Such a method greatly simplifies the requirements for photography and is still used in trade magazines produced by inexperienced staffs. Time employed a zone method, often with multiple framing. In a 1935 cover showing Jean Harlow, Time's trademark red line frames the entire cover, a double rule frames each of five boxes -- one with the logo, one with the picture, one with the cover line and publication data, and two with an ornate decorative border (presumably to take up the unused space). In the 1930s, Family Circle followed the unusual approach of placing multiple overlapping pictures on the cover, each with its own tilted, colored box of cover text.

Banners and Corners The banner on this Red Book from 1916 shows what appears to be a rare use of a banner with angled text; it is the only instance in the covers I examined before about 1950. Motor Life from 1956 contains a spectacularly wide slanted banner, with four widely spaced lines of text on a vivid yellow, in addition to a red inset box of cover lines at the bottom. Banners seem to belong to attention-grabbing "loud" covers, and have been used little, or in restrained ways, by successful, mainstream publications. An example of restrained use appears in the Sept. 1952 Life, with Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea" in it.

Text in Unplanned Spaces It is useful to distinguish several ways of placing text inside a cover picture. In the simplest approach, text might be described as being fitted into spaces that seem almost accidentally left blank by the illustrator. On this Physical Culture from 1916, the cover lines seem to be squeezed into awkward spaces around the cover model. Judging from conventional magazine practice of the day, the editor would probably have liked to list many more of the contributors' names, instead of "And Many Others."

Text in Planned Spaces As early as this 1900 Saturday Evening Post, magazine designers experimented with ways of combining pictures with cover lines. This unusual Post cover modified a billboard in the back of a crowd scene to create a space for its cover lines. (The Post, however, soon became a poster magazine, where cover lines were pressed to the bottom or edge of the illustration.) Illustrators found many ways to design spaces for cover lines, as in this clever Opportunity from 1911, where cover lines appear underneath the table the man is working at. The cover illustration for Red Book of 1917 was designed, as later photographs would be, with blank space onto which cover lines could be placed.

Editors were not bashful about designing illustrations that bestowed a special visual power on certain open spaces--so that cover lines could be placed into those spaces. This 1936 Physical Culture provides a vivid example of both a vivid illustration and a vivid placement of cover lines. Many, many illustrations created spaces especially for the display of cover lines, on elements inside the illustrations--such as walls, sails, columns, doorways, open windows, and other uniformly colored spaces against which type could be placed.

Adventure Magazines and Tabloids as Innovators in Cover Line Design Taboids and "pulp" magazines of adventure, crime, and romance from the early decades of the 20th century deserve a special mention for ways in which they pushed the envelope for the use of cover lines. Ironically, in their use of cover lines, many contemporary magazines bear more resemblance to these sensationalist magazines than they do to the more mainstream magazines of the same period. During the '20s and '30s, while mainstream magazines maintained a restrained, refined, polite design, or an art-school kind of elegance, this group of magazines spoke in the vernacular of advertising illustration and typography. Their intensely emotional pictures, vivid typography, loud cover lines, strong colors would be more at home on today's crowded magazine racks than the refined sophistication of the more successful magazines of their day. Thrilling Ranch Stories of 1934 represents a large genre of pulp magazines--often filled with fiction and fantasy--that not only held large readerships through the decades, but also pioneered an emotional, pushy, persuasive style of illustration and typography that must have shown more sophisticated designers what it took to capture and hold an audience. These magazines, which grew into tabloid-type shouters like the ironically named Whisper from 1959, were years or even decades ahead of mainstream magazines in using huge, expressive typography, powerfully evocative cover lines, and illustrations not constrained by conventions of aesthetics or politeness. Some pulp magazines blazed new trails on how to write gripping cover lines, where to place them for maximum impact, and how to set them in type in order to command attention from distracted audiences. These magazines pioneered the integration of powerful, asymmetrical pictures with large, vivid cover lines -- something now common in magazine cover design.

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