The Cover Story, 2003: Inconclusive, Fascinating

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March 1, 2003 by Cable Neuhaus

Byline: CABLE NEUHAUS Editor-in-Chief cneuhaus@mediacentral.com

I'm not one of those guys who constantly mucks around in the past, but I've got warm feelings about the era during which many magazine covers were legitimate works of art. And I miss them, I do. Some of us - the passionate, crazy few - would study those covers, collect them, gaze upon them as though they sprang from the studio of Michelangelo himself. In my home office in suburban New York, I have three framed covers of Fortune, all from the 1930s, when that magazine was wrapping itself with some of the most delectable art ever commissioned for a magazine. I don't recall how much I paid for those old Fortunes, which I found several years ago at a flea market in Pasadena, but whatever it was, it was a bargain. They were glorious (and nearly type-less) covers then, and they remain glorious covers now.

Still, you wouldn't dare put that kind of face on a magazine in 2003 - not without being called reckless, anyway - and that's sort of a shame. The brutal reality of today's retail climate forces most magazine-makers to forgo pure loveliness in favor of cleverness or sexiness or wackiness.

Today, as never before, all eyes are on the cover - if only fleetingly, because, the experts tell us, you've got just seconds to sell your mag at a newsstand. Colors, fonts, images, coverlines - the moving pieces of a magazine cover - can be manipulated in a million ways, and yet, in the end, despite all the agonizing and testing, the simple truth is that there is no such thing as an ideal cover, just many perceived ideals. (Besides which, can we all agree that if a cover sells well, it's "ideal" in the international idiom of commerce?) Anyway, in this issue of FOLIO: we take a stab at summarizing the latest, smartest thinking on this ever-tantalizing topic.

The man responsible for FOLIO:'s last several covers - including the unusual "double-dip" version this month - is Peter Tucker, our new art director. Peter joined us last October from his namesake magazine-design studio in Burlingame, California. There he'd worked on scores of magazines, all of which benefited from his sharp eye and, for sure, his wicked wit. (This is an a.d. who not only styles headlines, he sometimes writes them - and they're great.) Peter also has knocked around in the West Coast offices of Miller Freeman, Ziff Davis Media, and CMP Media.

I'm glad he's with us now. And, apparently, Peter is happy to be with FOLIO: - a place that is, in his words, "hog heaven for a magazine junkie." Over the last few months you may have noticed some design tweaks throughout our magazine, the result of Peter's search for a balance between what's cool and what's functional. More are on the way. "The challenge with FOLIO:," says our a.d., "is to reproduce the 'magazine experience' in the pages of a magazine." See if you don't agree with me, but I think Peter is well on his way to meeting that challenge.