decline of magazine covers

Michael Beirut mourns The Final Decline and Total Collapse of the American Magazine Cover

now that magazine covers only consist of celebrity photos, the author wonders what happened to the magainze covers designed by people like George Lois for Esquire in the 60s.

George Lois’s covers for Esquire provided my first glimpses into the world of graphic design thinking. In the suburban Cleveland of my childhood and early adolescence, Lois’s images — Mohammed Ali pierced with arrows a la St. Sebastian, Richard Nixon in the makeup chair, Andy Warhol drowning in his own soup – didn’t look like anything else in our house. I realize now they were like messages from another world, a world of irreverence and daring. Each was so brutally concise, so free of fat and sentiment. They weren’t just pictures, they were ideas. Even before I knew he existed, I wanted to do what George Lois did. I wanted to come up with those ideas. I suspect I wasn’t the only one.

he does go on to say that these types of covers just wouldn't work in today's marketplace, where covers need to seduce, not shock.

Rick Poyner summed this up nicely in the comments:

The shift from visual idea to visual formula reflects a shift of power since the 1960s from editorial priorities to marketing priorities. Consumer magazines exist to attract advertising, not because their publishers want to express a critical point of view about the world. The editorial is there to deliver readers to the advertisers and most of it is utterly saturated with the concerns and values of the advertising that surrounds it. But we knew all this.

The reason there are so many coverlines is simply that publishers are convinced that the more they offer upfront, the more chance something will appeal to readers. This leads to bad design, but unfortunately it appears to work.