Cover Types

In magazines, the have four different types of covers for it. There's the early magazine covers, the poster cover, pictures married to type, and the forest of words cover. 

In the earliest magazine covers starting in the 1700s they didn't really have covers but dedicated the first page with the title and just the table of contents. They usually looked like book-like layouts and just a small illustration. They usually had pictures that revealed nothing about the content inside of it. So generally most magazines didn't have covers and if they did it was mainly to put the table of contents on.

In the poster cover magazines became the type of magazine cover that became the most popular for a period of time. It was mostly artwork and the covers on the over sized magazines looked as if you could post them up as a poster, hence the name. It was good way to show off art work as well. In the 20th century, instead of art displayed it was photographs and sometimes used for magazine covers to portray a special issue and directed to more upscale readers. The main reason to use poster covers is the competition of the audience attention over all the covers because with just one thing on it, the main focus, will call more attention over the interesting issue, whatever it may be.

The difference between the the poster covers and married to type is that married to type's purpose were the big headlines to help draw more attention. Having words around the focus helps sometimes at depth and contrast of colors. This poster cover did not beat the attention to the poster cover but then during the 70's it was better, a magazine that had no cover lines. It was used mostly in fashion magazines that accentuated the nature of what fashion is. Then most of married to type covers changed and there was more words and now sometimes in front of some of the picture and became an advertiser type.