cover photo

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Front page with cover photo of an engine magazine

The cover picture is the motif on the cover of a book or magazine . The cover picture usually illustrates the title of the book (the cover story in magazines) and is intended to encourage the reader to buy. When selecting cover images, it is often assumed that a motif is selected that is recognizable from a greater distance.

Depending on the medium, the cover picture plays different roles:

  • In newspapers, a cover picture traditionally played no role due to the printing technology used, meanwhile newspapers also show larger, often colored pictures on the front page, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , which is considered to be particularly conservative , completely dispensed with pictures on the front page until 2007, in contrast to the tabloids , which used the Effect of cover images, the best-known example is BILD , where the name says it all .
  • In magazines and journals, the cover picture began to play an important role as part of marketing as early as the beginning of the 20th century . In the beginning it was graphics, from the 1920s on it was also photos. The pioneers here were magazines such as La Vie Parisienne with the colored covers by Chéri Hérouard or the covers by Time , which from the mid-1920s onwards showed the portrait photography of a person featured in the cover story as a cover photo (see below), sometimes a caricature instead of a photo the cover picture. Der Spiegel originally followed this model . Today, the Spiegel cover pictures are mostly graphics that illustrate the cover story, often symbolic graphics.
  • For books was the change from a bound book, where the frontispiece on the opposite side of the title held the role of a cover picture, towards the paperback paperback and modern Paperback envelope with envelope image the most important advertising medium. The aim is, firstly, to convey an impression of the content through the style and content of the image, secondly, to encourage people to buy by means of an appealing design and, thirdly, to ensure that the publisher or book series or author is recognized. In the case of novel versions of films or film adaptations of a novel , image material from the corresponding film is often used.

Since the modern forms of design for the cover, title page and cover picture developed predominantly in the Anglo-Saxon region, corresponding terms are often compositions with the English cover for envelope or envelope. This includes:

  • Cover picture : synonymous with cover picture
  • Cover photo : a photo as a cover photo, especially portrait photos in connection with a cover story, the cover photos of Time magazine are known here , which, regardless of the cover story, attest the depicted a special meaning or popularity.
  • Cover girl : Photography of a female person ( models , female stars or other prominent women), which should be particularly appealing to male readers; Notorious is the sexually connoted type of image (especially in men's magazines ) and the often intensive retouching or digital post-processing of the image
  • Cover Art : The covers of Pulp magazines developed typical styles and themes in the 1930s and 1940s, for example Margaret Brundage's Weird Tales covers . From the 1960s onwards, these developed their own, sometimes quite demanding, artistic forms for the design of cover images for genre literature , especially for science fiction , fantasy and horror literature . Well-known names here are Chris Achilleos , Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo .

  • Time cover photo from 1926

  • Cover art of an early science fiction magazine ( Amazing Stories , 1926)

  • Book cover

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Cover picture  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations