How to do a good job in magazine cover design

Regarding books, Japanese binding designer Kangping Sugura has a good metaphor: "A book is like a person, and the cover is equivalent to a person's face. The style of magazine cover design can basically reflect the general content and taste of the book. " The author believes that the same is true of magazines. Furthermore, people's faces have five senses of eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and magazine covers have basic elements, such as title, picture, barcode and issue number. These elements perform their respective duties in a limited two-dimensional space, serving a unified visual purpose and forming the basic appearance of a magazine. 1. Magazine cover design words reflecting personality and publication positioning play an important role in magazine cover design, and the words on the cover are a key for readers to understand the magazine content. The title is undoubtedly the most important part of the cover text, which is equivalent to the brand of an enterprise and the most basic feature used to distinguish it from other similar products. Therefore, the design and arrangement of titles can be said to be the top priority of magazine cover design. In order to be quickly recognized among various competitors, magazines usually design titles specially. It is an important task for magazine title design to accurately convey magazine connotation and highlight magazine personality characteristics. A good magazine title design can quickly enhance the overall image of the magazine and attract potential readers to the maximum extent. According to the characteristics of periodical publishing, in order to have a unified image, which is convenient for readers to identify and continue to buy and read, the font and style of periodical titles will not change for at least one year, and as another important part of magazine cover text, the content of each issue is different. Usually, a list of key articles will be arranged on the cover of each magazine, and sometimes some visual adjustments will be made according to the weight of the articles. When people decide whether to buy a magazine, they sometimes pay more attention to the theme than the title, because the title only represents the overall style and positioning of a magazine, and it is consistent, while the main content of the magazine in the hands of readers is reflected in the main content, which is why the theme of the text sometimes even exceeds the title. This phenomenon mainly appears in some news and fact magazines, and it often uses some articles that people are generally concerned about and have strong effectiveness as selling points-such as a large-scale activity or an important event. When dealing with these contents, designers will use the size and color of words to make them stand out from other magazines. Second, look for market rules, grasp readers' psychology, and choose the most attractive cover picture as a world language, because it transcends the boundaries of countries and regions and is easily accepted by different nationalities and races. Its expressive ability is more vivid and intuitive than words, and pictures are always more attractive in an instant than words, which determines that almost all magazine cover designers have to rack their brains to select the most impactful and exquisite pictures every month. Choosing a cover picture is not only regarded as an art, but also a science. For entertainment fashion magazines, the most common cover pictures are photos of people, whether singers, models or politicians. When George Roy, an American designer, designed the cover of "Master" magazine on 1968, Nixon was the theme, and he drew many of his hands to satirize his hypocrisy. It is one of the classic works of American graphic design, and it gained a huge circulation at that time. In 1960s, American printers conducted a survey of successful covers and concluded that creating eye contact between consumers and cover girls is an effective means to encourage them to take out magazines, which may be the reason why cover girls are flooding newsstands. Of course, not all magazines use people's photos as cover pictures. In some comprehensive abstract magazines, landscapes, animals and paintings are also common theme images on the cover. For example, readers, Youth Digest and other magazines generally choose some photos with beautiful pictures, which people like to see and hear and have a wide range of adaptation as cover pictures, because they are older and have a higher educational level. In this regard, some literary magazines have made good explorations and attempts, such as Tianya magazine. Recognizing the importance of magazine cover image, graphic designer Han Jiaying was hired to carry out the overall cover design and binding planning. According to the analysis of magazine contents and readers, the elements of ink and Chinese characters are extracted, and the Chinese characters are creatively processed and combined on the cover of each issue, which reflects the rich cultural atmosphere and China characteristics and expands the cover image of the magazine. Whether it is entertainment fashion, news and current affairs or other types of magazines, designers should consider the relationship between the image established through the cover picture and other elements of the cover (such as the magazine title), the impact on consumers, and whether it conforms to the magazine's own personality. Third, consider the small as the big, and do a good job in designing the emblem, bar code and issue number. As we can see, the cover should first convey the designed information to attract readers' desire to read and buy. However, the cover must also contain other necessary information related to the magazine, such as the emblem, barcode and issue number. Starting from the basic function, these elements must be included in the overall design without weakening the space of other important elements. On the cover of magazines, they occupy a small position, but they can also reflect the editorial thinking and publishing style orientation of periodicals. For example, a bar code with a white background is easy to attract people's vision because of its regular repetitive lines. In order not to destroy the integrity of the cover picture, bar codes are generally arranged on the corners. Of course, there are exceptions when there is a convention, so the designers of big magazines decided to break away from the convention and highlight the bar code and put it in the middle of the cover. This seems to be illegal, but it highlights personality. Today's magazines are dazzling, and the cover is not just a simple facade decoration. The cover of each magazine is the continuation of editing work, the crystallization of designers' artistic ideas and the external embodiment of periodical content. Generally speaking, the cover design of a magazine should grasp a design principle, that is, follow the principle of formal beauty, fully embody the connotation of the magazine, and its design should have the property of interacting with readers.

Specifically, magazine cover design includes four aspects: modeling, characters, color and composition.

Cover modeling mainly refers to the external modeling and internal modeling (text, graphics, etc.). The shape of the cover is generally rectangular or square except for a few special designs, which is determined by the layout of the magazine. Sometimes, for the sake of design, the length-width ratio can be adjusted within the allowable range of paper to change the usual shape. Cover content refers to text and graphics. Sometimes the title of a book can be composed of several different fonts, but one of them should be the main font. Words not only have the function of explanation, but also have the function of graphics.

At present, the cover specifications of most magazines on the market are 2 10*285mm.

Magazine covers can be without graphics, but not without words. Words have both linguistic meaning and abstract graphic symbols. It is the synthesis of point, line and surface design. For example, a word can be regarded as a point, a line of words can be regarded as a line, and a paragraph of text can be regarded as a surface. In the design, if we pay equal attention to graphics and text, the result will often be chaotic layout, and both aspects are not prominent. Therefore, the text and graphics should be relatively centralized layout, forming rhythm and hierarchy in reading, making the text compact and the graphics flexible.

There is not much decoration on the white cover, only the banner word "Africa" plus two lines of small print: "No matter what you think, please think again." Chris Johns, the new editor-in-chief of the magazine, pointed out that although words such as civil war, disease, poverty and extinction have occupied the headlines for a long time, people seem to be somewhat numb to them. He very much hopes that the world can re-understand Africa and understand Africa. So the cover of this magazine only uses words to express the theme.

The color treatment of cover design is the key to design. When readers browse newspapers and magazines, the first thing that the senses can recognize is color. Different colors such as red, orange, cyan, green, yellow, blue, purple, gray, black, gold and silver constitute the colorful world of magazine cover.

"Casual use of color" is the basic law of cover color art, and proper color expression and artistic treatment can produce eye-catching effects in readers' vision. The use of color should consider the needs of content, and express different content and ideas with the effect of different color contrast.

For example, using gray as the background can set off gorgeous words and graphics, which are harmonious and bright, and high-purity colors are arranged together, which is particularly exciting and active; Harmonious and unified colors make people feel warm and comfortable; Using the primary color of paper as the tone gives people the feeling of being natural, fresh and so on. Sometimes in order to pursue novel personality characteristics, we can give full play to them on the basis of routine. For example, achromatic color tune can also stand out in the colorful book sea. The color of the cover design is determined by the content of the book, the age and educational level of the readers.

Generally speaking, the color of children's publications should be designed according to the characteristics of children's tenderness, simplicity, innocence and loveliness. Tones are often treated as high-key, weakening the intensity of various contrasts and emphasizing softness; The color tone of women's books and periodicals can be chosen according to the characteristics of women, which is gentle, charming and elegant. The color of sports magazines emphasizes stimulation and contrast, and pursues color impact; The color requirements of art magazines are rich in connotation and depth, and cannot be frivolous or kitsch; The color of popular science books and periodicals can emphasize mystery; The colors of fashion magazines should be trendy and full of personality; The colors of professional academic magazines should be dignified, serious and elegant, reflecting the sense of authority, and it is not appropriate to emphasize high-purity hue contrast.

In addition to coordination, we should also pay attention to color contrast, including hue, purity and lightness. If there is no contrast between cold and warm colors on the cover, you will feel lifeless; If there is no contrast between lightness and depth on the cover, it will feel dull and breathless; If there is no pure contrast on the cover, you will feel archaic and vulgar. Cover color design should grasp the relationship between lightness, purity and hue, and at the same time use the relationship between the three to understand and find out the reasons for the disadvantages on the cover, so as to improve color cultivation.

The composition of cover design is a process of reasonably arranging words, figures and colors, in which words play a leading role and figures and colors set off the title of the book. Under normal circumstances, it is serious and upright to arrange the characters vertically. This is the traditional typesetting form of books and periodicals in China. Horizontal composition gives people a sense of composure, and horizontal arrangement of book titles can bring balance to the whole. Inclined arrangement can break the too smooth picture, thus realizing more changes, and it is helpful to strengthen the theme of books and periodicals if used properly. The modeling of cover design should have obvious characteristics of readers' age and educational level. The image of children's books should be concrete, true and accurate, and the composition should be lively, especially informative and interesting. Generally speaking, they should be designed and created with exaggerated, imaginative, personalized, playful and humorous illustrations. Children are in the so-called visual age, so children's books are more important and direct to their visual shock. It can cultivate children's rich emotions and imagination, which is the source of their future success and happiness. For young and middle-aged readers to the elderly, the image can gradually change from concrete to abstract, and the symbolic method should be adopted, and the composition can also change from lively form to serious and solemn form.

In short, designers should mobilize their design talents through imagination under the given layout, materials and printing technology conditions, so that their artistic aesthetic pursuit echoes the connotation of magazine "cultural form" With rich expression techniques and rich content, the intuitive understanding of visual thinking and the reasoning understanding of visual thinking are highly unified to meet the requirements of readers' knowledge, imagination and aesthetics.