We see a lot of front covers at magCulture, so when one hits us as strongly as the latest Eye magazine design, we want to dig a bit deeper into why it is so striking.

The front cover is such a key part of a magazine that over the years it has been overburdened with well-meant but often contradictory advice. Much of that advice has concerned bridging the gap between the creative and commercial impulses that direct the cover design, hence those contradictions. From a creative standpoint, for instance, a black and white image may be deemed desirable, yet commercially it has always been held that B&W covers sell less copies.

In the context of today’s magazine market, such longstanding assumptions are being left behind. As the mainstream fades away, so does the cut-throat commercial competition for readers. Multiple coverlines, celebrity covers and dayglo logos can still be found on the supermarket magazine shelf, but in shops like ours the magazine covers are calmer, simpler. The indie publisher wants people to buy their magazine as an active decision rather than be shouted into submission. Their appeal is directed toward a dedicated, longterm relationship with readers rather than the sugar rush of a one-off purchase. 

In this new context, then, the indie cover has to be a different thing. Simplicity wins, which may seem reassuring, but that easy phrase comes packaged with the news that creating something that seems simple can be very difficult.

Which brings us back to that Eye cover. It’s a montage of two images relating to stories inside the issue, an approach they’ve retained since their first issue in 1990. Being a magazine about design means they always have a rich source of imagery to call on, but it still takes work to make the images add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Eye’s art director Simon Esterson talked me through the design process, ‘It’s a very freeform thing: Holly Catford (art editor) and Sam Edwards (our current intern) are let loose on the image files and put together some suggestions. We print them all out and take a look.’ Simon, meanwhile, was busy finessing the inside pages. 

The whole team—editor John Walters and Janet South, who looks after marketing, join the discussion at this stage—then share their thoughts about which images work best. ‘It’s about both what they imply about the magazine and what they look like,’ Simon told me, ‘It doesn’t have to be the lead story. It shouldn’t look like the last issues’ cover, and sometimes I thrown in some printing extra (special colours, foil blocking, variable data digital printing) that I’m interested in using.’ It also has to work well at a small scale for social media.

‘A couple of favourites emerge and we go again with a second round of proofs. From these the final cover choice emerges.’ All of which implies a clean, simple process, until you realise that 20-30 different options were created, using different variations of images from various stories in the issue.

‘We like the way that our covers don’t have a hard message, that they’re open to multiple interpretations,’ Simon explained, going on to describe the latest cover, ‘with its AI created image by Jann Choy of Field and Margaret Calvert’s children crossing road sign are images created 60 years apart, one very ethereal, the other very vector and hard line. One personal, the other that has been seen (and acted on) by millions of users over the years.’

His description hints at some of the elements that appeal to me about the cover. The contrast between the softly pixelated AI-generated headshot and the vector-sharp road sign is intriguing but also contradicts our expectations: the futurist headshot should be super-sharp and hyper-realistic, while none of us has ever seen a road sign as clean and pinsharp as the rendition here. As Simon notes, the two images were created over 60 years apart; the road sign represents an era that held a positive sense of the future, while the AI image reflects a very different, contemporary sense of future.

The other factor here is composition. The two images fit comfortably together, and allow the Eye logo and issue number lozenge–both other vector images—to sit seperately from the road sign. The designers have also removed the white background of the sign, better combining the two images.

The result is a striking front cover that neatly achieves the two things a modern front cover must do: it will jump out at the curious browser that doesn’t already know Eye, while also reassuring the longstanding reader that Eye is still Eye.

See more Eye front covers here.