Magazine covers: how a cover is built, from masthead to barcode

Look at a copy of Time from 1923 and one from last week, and the same thing is there: a single face in a red frame, the title across the top, the date and the price tucked small near it. The first issue, dated 3 March 1923, showed Joseph G. Cannon, a retired Speaker of the House. A century later the layout has survived, because a magazine cover is built to be recognised first and read second. This page takes the parts of a cover in turn, using real covers as evidence, and then explains how decisions get made. Sixteen of the covers named here are tabulated further down.

Notable covers, described

• 1923-03

  Time, 3 March 1923

  The first issue of Time carries a single portrait of Joseph G. Cannon, the retired Speaker of the US House of Representatives, under the title.

  It set the formula of one face, one name and a title, which the magazine kept for decades. The red border that now identifies the title was added in 1927.

• 1925-02

  The New Yorker, 21 February 1925

  A dandy in a top hat studies a butterfly through a monocle. The drawing sits under the magazine's lettered title.

  The figure, later named Eustace Tilley, was drawn for the first issue and returns on the anniversary issue each February. It showed that a cover could be a drawing with a joke in it rather than a portrait or a headline.

  Rea Irvin

• 1932-07

  Vogue (US), July 1932

  A swimmer in a bathing costume throws a beach ball into the air. It is a colour photograph, not an illustration.

  It is generally given as the first colour photograph on the cover of American Vogue, and it marked the shift from drawn covers to photographic ones.

  Edward Steichen

• 1936-11

  Life, 23 November 1936

  The first issue of Life shows the concrete spillway of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana in black and white, with the title in white on a red block at top left. No person is the subject.

  It announced a picture magazine in which the photograph carried the story, and it put an engineering project on a cover instead of a celebrity.

  Margaret Bourke-White

• 1966-04

  Time, 8 April 1966

  The cover is type only: the words Is God Dead? in red capitals on a black background. There is no portrait and no illustration.

  It is remembered because a news magazine put a theological question on its cover without a face to soften it, to wide public reaction. The cover story was written by religion editor John T. Elson.

• 1968-04

  Esquire, April 1968

  Muhammad Ali stands bound with his arms behind him and is pierced by six arrows, posed after the paintings of Saint Sebastian. The cover line reads The Passion of Muhammad Ali.

  It is among the most admired American covers of the period. Ali had refused induction into the army, and the issue reached newsstands on 4 April 1968, the day Martin Luther King was killed.

  Carl Fischer (photograph), George Lois (art direction)

• 1980-05

  The Face, no. 1, May 1980

  The first issue shows Jerry Dammers of The Specials in a close portrait. The magazine was a music and style monthly started by Nick Logan.

  It launched the title that went on to shape the look of British style magazines in the 1980s.

  Chalkie Davies

• 1981-01

  Rolling Stone, 22 January 1981

  John Lennon, naked, curls around Yoko Ono, who is dressed, and presses his face to her cheek. The cover uses a colour photograph with the masthead across the top.

  The portrait was taken on 8 December 1980, hours before Lennon was shot dead outside his home in New York. Leibovitz called it the picture of her life.

  Annie Leibovitz

• 1985-06

  National Geographic, June 1985

  A young girl in a red headscarf looks straight into the lens with pale green eyes against a dark green background, inside the magazine's yellow border.

  The picture was taken in a refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1984. In 2002 a National Geographic team found the woman, Sharbat Gula, in Afghanistan, and her identity was confirmed by iris recognition.

  Steve McCurry

• 1988-11

  Vogue (US), November 1988

  Model Michaela Bercu is photographed in a jewelled Christian Lacroix jacket and stonewashed jeans, with her eyes half closed and not looking at the camera. It was the first issue edited by Anna Wintour.

  Jeans had not appeared on a Vogue cover before, and the mix of couture and denim was read as a signal of a new editor.

  Peter Lindbergh

• 1990-01

  British Vogue, January 1990

  Five models, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz, Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, pose together in black and white in their own jeans and shirts, with no heavy makeup.

  It is often called the birth certificate of the supermodel era. Editor Liz Tilberis asked Lindbergh to photograph what he thought the 1990s would look like.

  Peter Lindbergh

• 1991-08

  Vanity Fair, August 1991

  Demi Moore, naked and heavily pregnant, holds her belly and looks to the side. The cover line reads More Demi Moore.

  It started an argument about how pregnancy could be shown, and the pose was copied by many later covers.

  Annie Leibovitz

• 1993-09

  Rolling Stone, 16 September 1993

  Janet Jackson is shown in sepia, topless, in jeans, with a man's hands covering her breasts from behind. The hands belonged to her then husband Rene Elizondo.

  It became one of the best-known pop covers of the decade and tied in with the release of her album janet.

  Patrick Demarchelier

• 1994-06

  Time, 27 June 1994

  O. J. Simpson's police booking photograph is shown in a darkened, desaturated version with the corners burned.

  Newsweek ran the unaltered photograph the same week, and the comparison on newsstands led to charges that Time had made Simpson look darker and more menacing. The editor said no racial implication was intended, and the cover was a photo-illustration by Matt Mahurin.

  Matt Mahurin

• 2001-09

  The New Yorker, 24 September 2001

  The cover is almost entirely black, with the silhouettes of the Twin Towers printed in a slightly darker black, visible only when the light hits the ink at an angle.

  It was produced in the days after the attacks of 11 September 2001. It ranks among the top covers of the past forty years in the editors' poll of the American Society of Magazine Editors.

  Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly

• 2019-09

  British Vogue, September 2019

  Fifteen women stand in a grid under the title Forces for Change, and a sixteenth space is a mirror printed on the cover so the reader sees their own face. The issue was guest-edited by the Duchess of Sussex.

  The Duchess was the first person to guest-edit the September issue of British Vogue, the biggest of the year, and the mirror panel made the cover itself part of the idea.

Masthead: the title as a picture

The masthead is the title lettering, and for an established magazine it is the most valuable part of the cover. It is the only element that never changes in a successful title, so readers learn it as a shape. The New Yorker’s title is set in a typeface drawn by Rea Irvin, the art director who also drew the dandy with the monocle for the first issue on 21 February 1925. The title and the figure, now called Eustace Tilley, have outlasted every editor since.

The masthead’s position matters too. Most sit at the top, where a stack of copies in a shop shows only the upper third of each cover. Designers sometimes let the main image overlap the title to prove the picture is stronger than the logo, though not many titles can afford to. Time’s red border, added in 1927, makes the frame part of the title, and Wikipedia’s account of the magazine notes that it has been changed only a few times, including to black after the attacks of September 2001. A masthead is changed only reluctantly, and a redesign of it is usually announced as an event.

Cover lines: the text that sells the issue

Cover lines are the short phrases that tell a buyer what is inside. Their job is to give three or four different readers a reason to pick up the copy, so a good cover has a main line, a few supporting ones, and a lot of restraint. Some weeklies pack the page with lines until it reads like a contents list. Others, Private Eye among them, build the whole cover around one joke.

Some of the best covers have almost none. Esquire’s issue of April 1968 carried a single line beside its picture of Muhammad Ali, The Passion of Muhammad Ali, and Vanity Fair’s August 1991 issue used two words, More Demi Moore. Time’s cover of 8 April 1966 was the cover line and nothing else: Is God Dead? in red on black, with no face at all. If you are designing a cover of your own, that is the harder test. A strong line can carry a page without a photograph.

Main image: portrait, picture, or idea

Most newsstand covers are portraits, for a simple reason: a face sells. Within that, the range is wide. Annie Leibovitz’s picture of John Lennon and Yoko Ono for Rolling Stone, published on 22 January 1981, was taken on 8 December 1980, hours before Lennon was killed. Steve McCurry’s photograph for the June 1985 National Geographic, taken in a refugee camp near Peshawar, shows a girl looking straight at the camera. In 2002 a magazine team found the woman, Sharbat Gula, again, and the story of the Afghan Girl photograph records how her identity was confirmed by iris recognition.

Not every cover is a face. Life’s first issue, on 23 November 1936, put the spillway of the Fort Peck Dam on the front in a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White. The New Yorker’s black-on-black cover of 24 September 2001, by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, shows the outline of the Twin Towers in a slightly darker black that appears only when the page is tilted to the light. Neither is a portrait, and both are remembered. A longer account of what made particular covers work is on the page about famous magazine covers.

Price, issue and date line

The small print at the edge of a cover looks like clutter, but it does legal and commercial work. The price tells the buyer what to pay, though subscribers rarely pay it. The date tells the retailer when the copy comes off the shelf, and it is often a month or so ahead of the real calendar: a monthly dated September can be in shops in August.

Issue numbers matter more to collectors and libraries than to buyers. The Face, for example, began on 1 May 1980 with a cover of Jerry Dammers of The Specials, photographed by Chalkie Davies. Where a title is registered with the British Library, the ISSN printed on the cover or inside it is how libraries identify the periodical; the guide to publishing your own magazine covers how to get one.

Barcode: the part nobody designs, everybody places

Shops need to scan a copy, so the barcode takes a fixed corner, usually bottom left or right. Most periodicals use an EAN-13 code that begins with 977, followed by seven digits of the ISSN, with a short add-on that marks the issue, so the same title can be sold week after week without a new code each time. The ISSN system explains the numbering.

The placement is a design problem. A barcode is a hard-edged black and white box that sits badly against a photograph, and some art directors set it on a white panel, others knock it out in a pale area of the picture. The code has to stay readable, which limits how much the designer can do.

Who decides, and how

On a large commercial title the cover is a negotiation. The editor chooses the subject; the art director or creative director composes it; the picture editor commissions the photograph; and the publisher’s sales team watches how similar issues sold. A cover that wins prizes does not necessarily sell, and a cover that sells is not guaranteed a prize.

Anna Wintour’s first cover as editor of American Vogue, in November 1988, is the standard example of a deliberate break. Peter Lindbergh photographed the model Michaela Bercu in a jewelled Christian Lacroix jacket and stonewashed jeans, with her eyes half closed and not looking at the camera. Jeans had not been on a Vogue cover before, and the cover was read, correctly, as a signal about the editor. A little over a year later, British Vogue’s issue of January 1990 put five models, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz, Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, on a single black and white image, again by Lindbergh. Editor Liz Tilberis had asked him to show what the 1990s would look like.

Some editors have also used the cover as a place to hand over the page. For its September 2019 issue, British Vogue gave the cover to guest editor the Duchess of Sussex, who chose fifteen women and left the sixteenth place as a mirror, so that a reader looking at the copy saw their own face. It was the first time the September issue had been guest-edited by someone from outside the magazine.

When a cover goes wrong

Editors are rarely punished for being dull, but they are for getting a cover wrong in public. Time’s own cover page for 27 June 1994 confirms it used O. J. Simpson’s police booking photograph, darkened and desaturated by the photo-illustrator Matt Mahurin. Newsweek ran the plain photograph in the same week, the two sat side by side on newsstands, and Time was accused of making Simpson look darker and more menacing. Its editor said no racial implication was intended, and later copies on the stands were swapped for the unaltered image. Whether the darkening was simply a house style for Mahurin’s work or a misjudgement is the part that still gets argued about.

Three covers, three jobs

It helps to ask what each famous cover was for. Rolling Stone’s Lennon cover was a record of an event, and it worked because it was a picture of two people, not an announcement. The Janet Jackson cover of 16 September 1993, photographed by Patrick Demarchelier, was a promotion: a sepia portrait with a man’s hands across her chest, run when her album janet was out. The black New Yorker cover of September 2001 was neither. It was a response, made in the days after, with no cover lines at all and no hint of an advertisement.

Most covers sit closer to the second job than the third, and there is nothing wrong with that. The question to ask of any of them is the one a stranger asks in a newsagent: what is this, and do I want it. The sooner the cover answers, the better it does its work.

Sixteen covers worth knowing

The table lists sixteen covers named across this page and their credits, in date order, so you can check each against its issue.

Fashion titles have their own histories on the pages about Vogue and the best fashion magazines. The earliest titles, covered on the page about the oldest magazines, predate all of this. For a title whose yellow border is as fixed as Time’s red one, read the history of National Geographic.

The only element on this list that no editor controls is the one in the corner. Nobody decides which digits the barcode shows; the ISSN does.