Paul Raven made a com­ment today on his blog com­par­ing the art­work on a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent mag­a­zine cov­ers. Warren Ellis has recently been on about cover design as well. So I thought today, I’d look at the lat­est batch of cov­ers for every mag­a­zine I could remem­ber, and write some gen­er­al­ized thoughts on the design. I’m a self-taught designer, so take my com­ments and crit­i­cisms with a grain of salt.

Uploaded in no par­tic­u­lar order:

I’ve read often that space scenes sell mag­a­zines. What do you think? If you saw this on a news­stand, would it com­pel you to buy it? The typog­ra­phy here is so ridicu­lously con­ser­v­a­tive, staid. San ser­ifs for the win, I think not. The sharp points to the title face are high tech-ish, in direct con­trast to the title itself, which is about the fun­ni­est title for a sci­ence fic­tion mag­a­zine ever. Those harsh cor­ners seem to con­vey the harder nature of the con­tent, a harder SF, maybe.

This reminds me of the cov­ers of lit­er­ary jour­nals. What does it tell me, graph­i­cally, about this mag­a­zine? The images con­vey death, creep­ing unease, but the jux­ta­po­si­tion of the bright, red text hints at a vio­lence too. The Dark -> in the upper right hand cor­ner seems a bit odd to me. Also, do you think the num­ber of the issue is really the most impor­tant infor­ma­tion to con­vey on the cover? Does this design sell a mag­a­zine? What do you think?

The art here is very mod­ern, very cool by my eye. It reminds me of some­thing Dave McKean might do. It says more fan­tasy than sci­ence fic­tion to me, but I could con­ceive of a SF expla­na­tion. The bright reds and oranges really make it pop, although the yel­low side­bar tends to blend a bit with the palette. I would have con­sid­ered chang­ing up that color, maybe, but it’s at least a thought­ful color scheme. I think this cover con­veys what the mag­a­zine is, but the side­bar doesn’t con­vey any impor­tance of the arti­cles to me. All con­tent is weighted equally.

Authors, but no titles. And we know from expe­ri­ence that the cover art does not sig­nify any­thing about the story con­tent. I really like the type­faces used here. I’m not sure if Clarkesworld sells on the news­stand, but I might pick this up think­ing it was a comic book. Dunno if that is a good or bad thing.

Combines Lovecraftian images with steam­punk images. Masthead is dom­i­nant, and color scheme fits well with the art­work. Pretty mod­ern feel­ing in its choice of art­work style. There’s often a lot of tex­ture in the art­work on these newer zine cov­ers, have you noticed? I’m intrigued by this art. Does it scream hor­ror to me? No, but the ten­ta­cles are a pretty good hint at the con­tent. The main type­face strikes me as a bit goofy, not very ele­gant. I haven’t read it, so that might be a good rep­re­sen­ta­tion of its content–less gloomy hor­ror, more fun horror?

I had to really dig around to find this one. It seems that the Realms web­site has not updated their Current Issue page since August 2006. As some­one else said, it makes it look as if the mag­a­zine went out of print in 2006. Which I assume isn’t the case… Anyway, this cover sur­prised me because I really expected to see a media tie-in. My beef with this cover is that it’s cov­ered in text. The art is pretty nice, even if it reminds me of the kind of art you would see in Dragon mag­a­zine in the mid-90s. Not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing, but I find it inter­est­ing that this art here is miss­ing the tex­ture you are see­ing in the newer mag­a­zine cover art. How many type­faces are going on here? 3? more? The cross in the mast­head makes me think this has some­thing to do with Christianity. I really do not like the green­ish cir­cle with the “Plus” text.

Very dynamic, very hip. Again, a lot of tex­ture in this art. The break­ing out of a stan­dard blocky lay­out really makes this cover stand out from the rest. I really like the effect of the art inter­fac­ing with the text, mak­ing it seem almost like speech bub­bles. The hier­ar­chy of infor­ma­tion here seems solid, and well orga­nized. This cover is designed to sell mag­a­zines to peo­ple who have never seen the mag­a­zine. It’s prob­a­bly not hard to tell that this is my favorite.

I think this cover design loses the title of the mag­a­zine a bit, which is not some­thing I would shoot for. The hier­ar­chy is clear, and the art once again invokes that lit­er­ary jour­nal feel, as well as the size. I like the typog­ra­phy too. Nice, clean lines.

The less said about this the bet­ter. Just about the only thing that doesn’t bother me is the bar code place­ment. The font for the authors is not read­able at a distance–it’s too tight. So catch­ing a name on the news­stand isn’t too easy. The color palette says “I am gloomy.”

Robot design circa 1970s? Check. Kind of an odd color scheme and very con­ser­v­a­tive typog­ra­phy? Also check. This cover could have graced Asimov’s in the early 1980s and it would fit right in. That’s not even a dig at the authors, all of whom I respect and enjoy. This cover says “still the same mag­a­zine you bought on your way to see­ing Empire Strikes Back!” Not a good thing, in my opinion.

So what do you think? Which of these mag­a­zines would you have bought purely based on the cov­ers? What trends do you observe?

Tagged as: cover art, design, SF, SF magazines, zines