Magazine, Visual Design of

Abstract

Magazines use the aesthetic and rhetorical strategies of graphic design to produce style codes, which define the identity of the magazine as a recognizable title, and establish relationships with their audiences. The → magazine combines text and image to publish → news, information, editorial content, and → advertising. The structural components of the printed magazine include the cover (composed of masthead or title, and image), editorial and contents pages, single pages, and double‐page spreads. Magazine design employs the underlying structure of the grid (including columns and modules) to order arrangements of typographic, photographic, and illustrative elements on the page. The formal strategies of → graphic design, including proportion, balance, symmetry, color, rhythm, sequence, scale, and movement, are employed to produce visually persuasive texts (Frost 2003; Hurlburt 1978). As historical documents, magazines provide a record of relationships between → visual representation, identity, and consumption, across a vast spectrum of lifestyles, societies, and cultures (→ Magazine, History of).