Originally published within "Under the Covers," from Signature Magazine, 10/1/20
If you’re a fan of good magazine design — and if you’re even remotely connected with publishing, I hope you are — I highly recommend a visit to coverjunkie.com. It’s a website curated by Dutch art director Jaap Biemens of Volkskrant Magazine. Jaap scours the globe every week for the most interesting and provocative magazine cover layouts. When I scan the site for updates, the only uniform reaction that his selections inspire in me is one of surprise. The styles of imagery and typography are all over the map, as, indeed, are his sources. But I always see something I haven’t seen before.
I mention this not to compare Signature’s covers with the best of Jaap’s picks, but to pose a serious question: What makes a magazine cover good? More precisely, what makes a magazine cover work?
I’m sure there are as many competing philosophies on this as there are cover designers to philosophize about it. Not every magazine enters the market with exactly the same set of challenges. Budgets vary. Audiences vary. Means of distribution vary.
That last point is especially significant for association publishers. Newsstand magazines (at least in Before Times when people visited bookstores and newsstands) have to slug it out against one another to compete for shelf space and customer attention. Their success is measured in sales, subscriptions, and advertising revenue.
Many association publishers compete in a very different theater of operations. The association magazine is usually a membership benefit, sent to the putative reader’s home or workplace. While it’s been paid for via membership dues, it probably wasn’t purchased as a standalone item. At home, it’s jockeying against subscription material that was actually paid for separately.
Studies have shown that readers don’t treat the information included in organizational publications and newsstand publications differently. But another study — the Magazine Reader Experience Study, by the Media Management Center at Northwestern University — reveals a bias in user experience predicated on money. The most popular descriptor of the magazine user experience is “I get value for my time and money.” The transactional nature of the relationship is never far from readers’ minds.
That’s a handicap for associations whose magazines don’t employ all of the weapons used in the newsstand magazine arsenal. Those aren’t merely limited to such proven editorial devices as numbers, short headlines, and eye contact. Just as in any battle, never underestimate the element of surprise.
The real surprise from that Northwestern survey came with its second most common user experience descriptor. Bear in mind: These were comments connected with publications that the subjects had chosen to read regularly. The number two comment? Not “I love it.” Not “I hate it.” The second most common refrain was, “It disappoints me.”
That’s a devastating verdict. Love and hate are at least undergirded by feelings of passion. But what could be worse than disappointment? It’s the parental pronouncement that every child fears most: “I’m disappointed in you.” There were expectations; they were not met. Even bewilderment would be a preferable response.
Why do I bring this up with reference to this issue’s cover? Funny I should ask. Our topic is the new world of remote working in which most of us now find ourselves. The association angle may be new territory, but Signature isn’t exactly in the vanguard on the matter of working from home. In an amazingly short time, a whole cottage industry of advice, punditry, and imagery centered around the housebound employee has erupted, almost from nowhere.
In my search for the right cover concept, I decided that for at least one iteration, I would approach the subject from the opposite direction. While I’ve seen many pictures of familiar and even ingenious home workspaces, I haven’t yet seen the inverse: What was left behind at the office? Could the new remote employee reality be illustrated without showing the remote environment?
Full disclosure: This idea was undeniably inspired by my own unique work situation. My company reopened its office back in June on a limited and entirely voluntary basis. We worked out precise schedules to limit employee exposure, stocked up on sanitizing supplies, and sent out strict rules on masking and equipment use.
Thus far, I am the only employee to return. I spend most days in a deserted office built for a staff of nearly three dozen. Desks and offices have been left in a kind of suspended animation since our last day together in March. Coats are hung. Undrunk beverages sit next to blinking phones. It’s as if the whole office stepped out for lunch and just never returned.
I cannot recommend the experience, but it set me to constructively thinking about my only remaining officemates: the appliances. It seemed to me that of all the workplace gadgets, the water cooler stands to lose the most from the new remote regime. In popular imagination, it’s the place where employees gather to gossip and laugh, trading stories and reflections on the latest news or TV programs. Left to its own conclusions, the water cooler must assume that it’s the most well-liked machine in the office. It’s one of the gang.
And now the gang has disappeared without so much as saying, “Goodbye.” The water cooler has not merely been left ignorant (blissfully) of the coronavirus. It has no idea where everybody went or when — or even if — they will ever return. I felt compelled to share its torment with the world. Like I said, nobody else has yet.
Regular readers of this column will already know that the story can’t end here. Having freed my mind of its preoccupation with an inanimate object, I turned to a more direct illustration of the cover topic, shown in the image here:
I started with an image of workers in separate boxes, communicating by crude means. But the boxes could connote separate offices just as much as separate dwellings. I settled on the clouds as a double entendre: cloud-based collaboration coupled with a heavenly work environment. The idea might not have been as original as my sad water cooler, but I did feel that I’d come up with a superior headline.
And so began the usual rounds of soul-searching deliberations among Signature’s Publisher/Editorial Director Carla Kalogeridis, Associate Editor Thomas Marcetti, and myself. We were all drawn to the plight of the lonely water cooler, but the cloud cover’s headline proved equally seductive. We traded alternate decks for both covers, hoping that a twist of the language would make our decision for us.
It didn’t help. Finally, I tossed the dilemma to my remote colleagues: Which cover should we use? We received strong arguments around both solutions, but the water cooler engendered the reaction that I’d most hoped for: “I haven’t seen that before.”
That said, surprise is no substitute for relevance. This cover isn’t the first or the last word on remote work policies — and neither was it meant to be. As my first mentor in this business once said to me, the magazine cover is a sales tool. It’s no different from a page of advertising, and its product is that very set of pages in the customer’s hands. If the customer turns the page, it worked. It was a good cover.
Well? You’re here, aren’t you?
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