COVER TESTING

Anyone interested in our magazine may have noticed we’ve been messing around with the cover lately. Its about a year or so since we redesigned the magazine and it feels like a good time to experiment. So we’ve been producing a couple of different versions of the same cover each week, seeing how they work and feel. 

One of the iterations we really like has been using a ‘flap’. This device - used by publications such as the New Yorker and The Atlantic - is interesting as it (self-evidently) sweeps all the cover lines off the art and onto the flap, so you can use the actual cover more like poster, whilst simultaneously projecting the magazine content far more effectively.

So above is a gallery of the covers we did this week. It is a something of an odyssey of options as we did a split run too. So… It starts with the two test cover flap options - what the flap looked like on the magazine (#1,3), then the cover beneath (#2,4). Following that are the two flap-less standard versions (#5,6) which are covers the majority of you will see on the newsstands, then finally the subscriber version (#7).

The subscriber cover is often the bane of my week. To keep postage costs down, the addressing information of the subscriber is stamped directly onto the cover at the printers, thereby dispensing of the need for an envelope. This means we have to provide a large white box in the bottom left hand corner for the address to be printed onto. With these covers this would mean either slicing the base of woman’s legs off and/or obscuring most of the detail in male picture. So we just went for the female version where the art was shifted and shrunk down to fit. I actually quite like the use of space in the finished result (for once), but its still not as satisfying as the others.

That all make sense? Seems very complicated but there you go…