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"Most publications fall into two categories: coping and craving"

Paula Scher http://www.aigany.org/ideas/features/scher.html

Coping magazines tend to have lots of instructional information. It is often completely useless, but it looks didactic all the same. Graphic devices used in coping publications are:

- side bars
- decorative headings (early 1980s: in boxes with or without drop shadows; late 1980s: no boxes, but perhaps underscores, overscores, sometimes with teeny halftone photos; 1990s: lozenges)
- dingbats
- icons
- elaborately illustrated charts and graphs with inset photos that are silhouetted and have drop shadows or spot illustration

Craving magazines tend toward big, splashy, dramatic layouts of photographs filled with people, places, and stuff. At the time I took on Quality they needed:

- widely spaced type (later the opposite: big type in capitals with little spacing)
- layering
- out-of-focus photos, photos of people or places that look wet
- big drop caps or big words (later no drop caps or big words)
- textured backgrounds (later white space)
- rough devices, like photographic contact sheets or grease-pencil marks

The mannerisms of these types of publication informed all other forms of graphic design in the eighties and nineties, and are now the visual language of annual reports, brochures, books, packaging, and fashion advertising. Coping devices leaped right off magazine pages and became the language of computer screens. Most Web sites today owe their styling and organization to the coping magazines of the eighties and early nineties.