Designers reveal their favourite magazine cover designs
Ahead of a London design festival event, industry experts have shared their favourite magazine cover designs, arguing that print magazines still excel at deeply engaging readers. Stack founder Steve Watson says it's time to rethink what magazine success looks like today.
A one-day event at the upcoming London design festival will bring together editors, publishers, designers, historians and academics to discuss the changing roles magazines have played over the decades. Among the participants is Steve Watson, founder of the subscription magazine club Stack, who argues it makes little sense to compare today's magazines to those of the 1960s, when many people didn't even own colour televisions. While print is no longer the fastest or cheapest way to reach a mass audience, he says it remains uniquely effective at fostering deep engagement, giving readers a chance to slow down and absorb information.
Covers across the decades
Several industry figures shared their standout cover picks, ranging from the 1914 avant-garde publication Blast, released a month before Britain entered the first world war and later described as a precursor to punk, to the debut 1972 UK issue of Cosmopolitan, which sold 350,000 copies by lunchtime on its first day and reshaped what a women's magazine could be.
Other selections included Life magazine's 1969 cover featuring the faces of American dead in Vietnam, the 1865 Cornhill magazine edited by novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, and more recent examples such as Bloomberg Businessweek (2016), New York magazine's Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe cover (2008), Frieze (2010) and Interview magazine's Lana Del Rey cover (2023). Despite frequent gloomy predictions about the future of print, Watson remains optimistic, noting that striking new magazine titles continue to launch regularly.
