Showcase Of Creative Magazine Covers

There are literally thousands of magazines published every month, only the high quality and good ones make it mainstream. The quote “A picture is worth a thousand words” and “First impression is the best impression” apply greatly to magazines. It is the covers of these magazines that creates the impulse, that uncontrollable urge to grab hold of the magazine and flip it open.

The following is a list of some 35+ magazine covers that will truly instill the urge in a person to pick up a copy. These covers are not only creative, but also inspiring. But I won’t spoil it for you, you be the judge.

Computer Arts

Computer Arts is one of the world’s best-selling magazine for digital artists, designers, illustrators, etc. With in-depth tutorials, and interviews, the magazine remains a favorite among designers.

TNHB Magazine

TNHB Magazine is an illustrated magazine by Grzegorz Domaradzki and StudioKxx. Since the magazine does not have an official website, not much is known about it.

FEFE Magazine

FEFE is an arts magazine, and project by Luigi Vernieri. The magazine covers various topics on art. The magazine is a platform for generating a cultural system centered on the “visual culture”.

BE

Digital Age

ESPN

JOiA Magazine

JOiA Magazine is a visual and design related arts magazine. The magazine is full of the finest selection of visual art content. While JOiA only publishes 5 issues per year, their high standards have put them on a high position in the literature of Arts and Design – no less than the national level.

Advanced Photoshop Magazine

Advanced Photoshop Magazine is an Adobe Photoshop oriented magazine, that has everything related to Photoshop. From tutorials, to inspirational artwork showcases, to even artists interviews. Advanced Photoshop Magazine is one of the best Photoshop magazine out there at this moment.

Lettering & Type

Lettering & Type is a powerful and essential how-to book full of relevant theories, history, diagrams and excersies regarding typeface designs and typography.

PAGE

PAGE Magazine is created by creative professional people in design, advertising, and media supplies. Not only do they show portfolios of some great artists, they also talk about different fields of art, such as architecture, 3D, and many more.

WebDesign HS7 Magazine

WebDesign HS7 is a magazine by Mathieu Schatzler, who is a graphic designer & art director from Lille, France. Mathieu has worked on branding & rebranding concepts, along with some high-quality illustrations. This magazine is all about that.

WOW

WOW Magazine (now WOWMAGZ) is a free electronic/digital graphic design magazine that supports designers and creative communities around the world by shining a spotlight on them. Showcasing the greatest Artwork in Digital Art, Photography, Illustration, 3D arts, Motion Graphic and more.

GOOD Magazine

GOOD Magazine is a collaboration between individual parties, such as businesses, moms, kids, organizations, etc that work together to find what is good, prosperous and creative.

Pixel Arts

Pixel Arts is a magazine that is all about creativity in best animation works, cartoons, motion graphics and tv design. It is a company located in Romania.

Red Bulletin

The Red Bulletin is a Formula One magazine by Red Bull. The magazine covers the world of Formula One, especially the Red Bull world, events and happenings related to them.

The Walrus Magazine

The Walrus magazine was launched with a simple aim: to be a national general interest magazine about Canada and its place in the world. Ever since, The Walrus Magazine has started becoming ‘a little’ popular day by day.

Gazele Biznesu

Gazele Biznesu is a business-oriented magazine that gives out an annual ranking for developing small and medium businesses. The project is run jointly by nine newspapers belonging to Bonnier Publishing Group, based in Poland.

Proyecto Diseño

Due to the language barrier, I am unable to tell you much about this magazine except that looks good.

IDEA Magazine

Unobtrusive Website Toolbars To Help Increase User Engagement

Pop-ups, pop-unders, splash pages, marquees and other "in your face" techniques to grab your visitors’ attention are so yesterday . They create bad user experiences and is also likely to piss visitors off. Not only will they not work for today’s web surfers, they are bound to backfire.

Designers and bloggers all face a common goal – we want our visitors to read important site notices, to know about current happenings (giveaways, announcements, etc) or even encourage them to follow/vote for us on various social networks. We want all these to messages to be delivered and at the same time, to be assured that they are not irritated by the way we present it. But how?

You probably have an answer already, or some tricks up your sleeves. But if you don’t, here are some solutions that we’ve come to know of and we are going to share them with you.

In today’s post, we list a couple of unobstructive methods (scripts and services) that allow you to send notifications, or messages to your readers while they visit your website. In our opinon, their scripts are lightweight and their methods, understated and elegant.

Full list after the jump.

1. ViperBar

ViperBar is a unobtrusive notification bar for WordPress sites. It has some pretty amazing features, i.e, real-time analytics, custom bar styling, A/B testing, and much more. On top of that, ViperBar also works with newsletter campaign services like Aweber, Mailchimp and Feedburner. The best news is: it is free.

More: Get ViperBar | Screenshots

2. FooBar

Foobar is a WordPress notification bar that allows you to do all sorts of things. You can create unlimited number of bars, customize it, insert custom HTML, finetune its look and feel via WordPress Admin, and more. Foobar cost $12 and is available at CodeCanyon.

More: Demo | Screenshots | FooBar Reviews

3. Hello Bar

Hello Bar has both free and a paid versions of a notification bar with full-blast features ranging from analytics to A/B testing. The free version limits you to 25 successful click-throughs/month while the paid version, starting from $4.95/month, offers packages from 100 click-throughs to 2500 click-throughs and opens up to an array of advanced features. Hello Bar is a great for budding bloggers to build up their RSS subscribers and Twitter followers.

More: Get Hello Bar | Demo | FAQ

4. Quick Notice

Quick Notice Bar is a free WordPress plugin that displays a row on your WordPress header. It allows you to include almost anything, like site notices and announcements, social network buttons, tweets, titles of the latest posts, just to name a few. It is customizable, and it even supports Google link ads. Quick Notice Bar also has a small arrow button on the right that allows visitors to toggle the bar hide/shown.

More: Get Quick Notice | Demo

5. SimpleReach Slide

SimpleReach Slide takes a different approach. It’s a small rectangular box that slides out from the bottom right when visitors scroll towards the end of the post. It can contain post recommended by you for your readers, or you can also use it to encourage votes. It is pretty efficient to keep readers engaged. SimpleReach works for WordPress, Drupal, Blogger, or even static websites.

More: Get SimpleReach | Documentation | Demo (scroll down to page end)

6. Meebo Toolbar

Meebo Toolbar is perhaps one of the most widely used notification toolbar around the Web. One of its biggest advantage is the ability to allow users to share images and links to various social networks simply by dragging and dropping them. Meebo also allows publishers to participate in their ad revenue program by showing CPM-based ads on the toolbar.

Find out more about Meebo Toolbar and other social network toolbars.

More: Get Meebo Toolbar | Demo | FAQ

7. Digg Digg Floating Icons

Digg Digg is a social plugin for WordPress. It allows you to float a row of social network voting badges/buttons of your choice on your WordPress blog.

Use it to display badges/buttons of almost any social network, e.g, Google+, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, just to name a few. You can also manually place icons wherever you want on your website, as long as you are comfortable editing the theme’s codes.

One small tip though – if you’re using a floating bar, it may be better to fix its position than to allow it to scroll. A floating bar that moves along with page scrolling can be irritating to some readers.

More: Get Digg Digg | User Guide

More Unobtrusive Methods

Aside from the toolbars that occupy a portion of the screen, and/or hide upon user clicks, there are other methods to reach out to website visitors or send messages (notifications) across. Here are more alternative user engagement services/methods that I’ve come to know of.

Notif!Er

Notif!er allows you to prompt inline notification wherever you see fit. Use it to notify users when they clicked a button, edited an article, submited a comment, or anything at all.

It is unobtrusive, customizable and it runs on jQuery.

More: Demo | Download

Humane JS

Humane JS is framework independent and allows full customization, as long as you have basic knowledge in Javascript.

It will work on most setups, even on mobile.

More: Demo | Download

Notty

Notty is another option if you want to send a message to your readers without irking them with intrusive popups and slides.

The different thing about Notty is that it only appears when the user allows it to. It appears in an elegant manner and fades away just as elegantly as it came.

More: Demo | Download

Tipped

Tipped is a complete jQuery plugin with its own library that you can use to fully customize advanced notifications.

The demo version is free and has a watermark on it,. You can always have it removed by purchasing a license for as low as 3 Euros.

The good thing about Tipped is that it is fully customizable, you can do almost anything you want with it, from notifying people about new posts to simple on-hover notification.

More: Demo | Download