Front Cover:
The covers of Sports Illustrated consistently features a single event, figure or theme in the issue. They most commonly show a single portrait of an athlete on their front covers, often occupying 70 percent of the space. Headlines addressing the athlete are also made into bold typography and placed beside the portrait. The purpose of doing so is to attract the audience with large and eye catching images and fonts. It is also to showcase the event or theme that this particular issue is going to focus on. Meanwhile, comparing to the bold, eye catching headlines, the “Sports Illustrated” icon on the front cover always seems to be smaller and less prominent. It is often half hidden as background under the featured figures. The purpose is to lessen the emphasis on the icon and add more attention to the image.
Table of Contents:
Sports Illustrated’s table of content uses only one page as its space. It uses an image as the background and reveals the table of contents in the form of a 2 x 4 table. Feature stories and their corresponding page numbers are listed clearly in the table. Also adequate white space is left in the page so that the content doesn’t feel too overwhelming.
Departments and Sections:
There are all together 5 departments in the Feb issue: “Editor’s letter”, “Leading off”, “Scorecard”, “Faces in the Crowd”, “Point after”. Among all the departments, only the “Faces in the Crowd” department is divided into 8 sections. The rest of the departments stand on their own.
Readers can find in which particular department they are at by looking at the up left corner of each page. Also, page numbers are marked in the lower left and right corners of each page so that readers can flip to the TOC to check where they are at.
