Cover Types

Early Magazine Covers - When magazines used covers, they tried to make them look like the covers of books, by only putting the title and information about the publication. It didn't have any words that told you what would be inside of the magazine. They also had a table of contents section inside of the magazine. This style, a book like form of magazine cover, continued from about the 1700's to 1800's.
Mothers Magazine is an example of a common cover that was used in the 1800's. Covers usually didn't have any lines telling you what was inside, they were rare and many of the magazines in the 1800's had no covers. Cover lines started being put on in the late 1800's. The Peterson's woman's magazine had a cover with a picture on it, and on the top of the magazine it said "Now is the time to make up clubs."
They were mainly interested in whether or not they should use cover lines on their magazines, and if they did have them, how many of them should the use.

The Poster Cover - This form of cover was used from the late 1800s to the 1960s. It is said to set the standard for all other kinds of covers. It had become really famous by the early 1900s. The covers were huge and looked like they could be framed and hung on a wall. Most of the cover photos are just photos that gave out a good mood or a season. A lot of these photos are gorgeous and captivating. Most of them didn't have cover lines, but then they started gathering a few. They put the cover lines at the bottom or where they had room, but when they did put them they made them really small.

Pictures Married To Type - Cover lines are kind of known now, and they are used, but now it has a big title and a model in a weird pose. The cover lines are put in very carefully. And it is very important that they are. They put a lot of colors on their magazines and put the cover lines in a way that didn't distract from the picture. But in the late 1960s they stopped making the captions small and hidden. They put them really big and sometimes they even underlined them in different colors to add emphasis and to draw attention. Pretty soon cover lines started being really larger and colorful and powerful.

In The Forest of Words - It starts at around the 1930s and goes to the 2000s. They make the picture extremely powerful and they overlap some of the words with pictures. They still had a lot of cover lines now. But the images are not in the foreground anymore. They make the cover lines in the foreground and they make a lot of things close up. They are covered by a cluster of words and sometimes are too much. A quote from Longleaf.net says "The models on magazine covers look at us through the listed contents of those magazines, which they practically wear like a garment, or stand in, like an aura."