Early magazine covers are models after book covers, providing title, publication dates, decorative illustration that can be symbolic, and no content description. This type of magazine sometimes may not have a cover at all to show the content of the inside. The no-cover idea bring about the question if magazines for the next century should have a cover lines.

The poster cover was based from the Art Norveau movement of crafting artistic posters, in which graphic design and excellent photographs dominate the whole cover. The poster cover isn't just called poster cover because of the graphic design and photographs, but the size of these cover is big enough to be hung on the wall like a poster. The photographs presented on the cover is not related to the content at all, it just convey a season or general mood.

Pictures married to text usually consist of a photograph with it's background written across by content description while the main subject of the photo pops out. Cover lines are strong, large, loud, colorful that compete with other magazines. These types of poster is still being used today and very competitive. The mood or the tone of the color describe the magazine as a whole.

In the forest of words' magazine cover history started by the magazine Mademoiselle and it has evolve in many creative ways but the general movement of the magazine cover path is now based on artistic poster cover that shows the intense photography with a large number of vivid cover lines. The large vivid cover line itself may be bigger in size than the magazine's name and usually overlaps the subject of cover photography.