/ About
/ See cover lines filtered by magazine: Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Maxim, Men's Health, Redbook, Self, Women's Health,
/ See cover lines filtered by tags: action, bed, bliss, body, burning, butt, confessions, couples, crave, crazy, dark, desires, dirty, electric, fantasies, foreplay, g-spot, good, guys, horny, hot, men, moves, muscles, naked, naughty, number of things, orgasm, period, pleasure, problems, secrets, seduce, sex questions, sex tapes, shy, STDs, strokes, surprise, thank you, thong, trick, turn ons, vagina, vibes, vixen, wants, wicked, wild, women,
/ Wanna share on your blog/tumblr/ffffound? Here is a 1250 × 1250 thumbnail
/ This is a titillating typographic and linguistic examination by UnderConsideration

About

Many decades ago magazine covers were a thing of beauty: The logo of the publication emblazoned large across the top. Falling gently upon a full-bleed photograph or illustration and nothing more. No bar code for sure. And — something that seems impossible to visualize today — no cover lines. That’s right. People would actually need to flip to the table of contents or even venture into the magazine itself to find out what the feature stories or worthwhile columns would be. Step up to any magazine today and it’s The Attack of the Cover Lines in such dizzying sizes and compositions that every story or column is made to appear as if it’s the best piece of editorial that has ever been printed.

But there is no cover line like The Sex Cover Line. You know the one. The one that promises to reveal all the secrets to great sex, better sex, hotter sex, or, at the very least, to how to get sex, period. Sometimes they might even illuminate you with what the other sex thinks, wants, and needs. And at other times they even dare pinpoint the elusive X spot or range of spots that will unleash the beast within your partner. But no matter what, the Sex Cover Lines are provocative, tantalizing, and cheerful. And, well, also very ridiculous.

We have compiled a selection of 69 sex cover lines — I mean, how we could not set that number as our goal? — from men and women magazines from 2010. (The latter’s publications featuring sex cover lines far outnumbers those of the former). Each cover line has been extracted from its context, rendered in black-and-white, and recreated within a predetermined height, so the sizing is not relative. Where possible, we have used the typefaces we believe the magazine is using and in others — whether we don’t own the typeface or can not identify it — have used typefaces similar in proportion. We have no intention of keeping this up to date with 2011 cover lines, even though we do realize its fun potential to be a hilarious archive including cover lines from around the world but there are just so many minutes every day.

As a typographic and linguistic compilation we find these 69 cover lines to be both hypnotic and entertaining. And, yes, you would be right, there is no real reason to have done this, but this applies to most things on the internet, so we’ll leave this as a fun exercise that consumed a few days and, above all, left us questioning our own sex knowledge. Better hit the mags!

Extra special thanks to our current intern, Lauren Dickens, for typesetting all 69 cover lines.

All the best, from UnderConsideration.

UnderConsideration is a graphic design enterprise that runs a network of blogs, publishes books, organizes live events, and designs for clients.