A recent post on Torontoist about the The Art of Dose, where they feature a interview with former Editor-In-Chief of Dose Pema Hegan. For those of you who have been tracking my various blogs for a long time, you know how enamored I was of Dose’s design — not only their covers, but their page layouts and their graphics — and how sad I was that the print version of the newspaper had to be discontinued. I have tried to continue visiting the Dose website, but the effect is completely different: I didn’t pick up Dose everyday for the content, but for the fantastic aesthetic presence it had, a sensibility that isn’t adequately conveyed on the website.

Speaking about cover design to Torontoist editor Marc Lostracco, Hegan said:

We believed the cover was our single biggest opportunity to introduce new readers to Dose. It needed to reach out to people walking past the box, and that is hard to do with a busy front page full of stories. We thought the best approach was to focus on a single issue/idea and find a smart and visually interesting way to communicate it.

Hegan gets it right: while more and more newspapers are trying to crowd more and more stories onto their front pages, Dose realized that people’s attention spans don’t have the time to digest all that text. Instead, people want a front page that speaks to them, that speaks to the issues that are on their mind, and that appeals to their visual tastes.

Of course, great cover design needs to be backed up by great content, and that may have been the cause of Dose’s demise. One newspaper I have been following quite regularly (other than The Guardian, The Toronto Star, and The New York Times, of course) has been the The Independent out in the UK. Ever since they ran that absolutely stunning infographic about a Middle East ceasefire last year, I’ve been completely enthralled by the way they present cutting news and pressing information on their front pages. Unlike Dose, however, The Independent has done a great job of marrying fantastic design with insightful content inside the newspaper. While it may not have the journalistic cachet as a paper like The Guardian, for example, The Independent still stands out as a premier newspaper available in the United Kingdom because of the issues it addresses, but mainly because of of the way it stands out in the newsstands by its design.

I’ve written about cover design before on this weblog, but most of my insight on the topic has been limited to the crafting of book covers. While I will admit that good cover design might be a bit more important for books which don’t have serial subscribers in order to buoy their sales, it is undeniable that periodicals need to embrace the importance of front page design in a world where people don’t have time to examine before they make the decision to purchase. Malcolm Gladwell said it in Blink, and he was absolutely correct: the decision to pick up that newspaper or that magazine is made in your first glance. And while it is clear that some publishers realize this and put the necessary resources into styling their covers, I have yet to see any kind of periodical achieve the kind of brilliance that George Lois created for Esquire in the 1960s.

I put a quick message up on Twitter yesterday asking for suggestions of other newspapers that have great cover design, and here’s a quick list of a few that were recommended to me: Chicago Sun-Times, Hamilton Spectator, Houston Chronicle, Publico Lisboa and Rocky Mountain News. I haven’t been following all those papers regularly, so I can’t vouch for their quality, but if you’re interested in seeing what kinds of newspapers my Twitter friends like to read, check out their websites or search for them at the Newseum.

And of course, you can’t forget the excellent sites Newsdesigner and Best Front Design. They say everything I’ve said here with examples, every day.