Visually literate magazine covers grab readers, tell stories.

Cover pictures are the most important images to appear in any magazine. Good ones can stop readers in their tracks and pull them inside to the most important story in the publication. They often tell a story in their own right as well.

Unfortunately, many organizations squander this opportunity by decorating their magazine covers with either superficial drawings or sterile, literal pictures that fail to communicate. This month we look at four relatively rare organizational magazine cover photos that successfully buck the trend. These visually literate covers draw on landscape, incongruity, symbolism, and human values to encourage potential readers to pursue important stories awaiting them inside these publications.

A recent issue of SCANA Insights, quarterly magazine of SCANA Corporation (Columbia, S.C.), featured a landscape photograph on its cover that will draw readers inside to read an important corporate story. The image is very simple -- three-quarters of its surface is devoted to flowing purple and gold clouds drifting high above a lake at dusk. All this open space provides room for the magazine's logo and a blurb, featuring the name and nature of the subject, to float above the lake. Readers who go inside will learn that SCANA is donating this lake and its surrounding properties to the State of South Carolina for preservation and conservation. As for the picture itself, its evocation of tranquillity and natural beauty validates the very qualities this company intends to preserve.

The Business of Caring is published by CIGNA Corporation (Philadelphia, Pa.) for its customer-contact employees. A recent issue featured a cover picture of four smiling executives and one very delighted youngster. The situation is incongruous, and to make it more so, one member of the executive quartet appears as a picture within the picture.

A blurb adds important context. The man in that picture had a dream. Pass it on. And that's the point of this picture. The man on the right is trying to pass on a company started by his own father to his two sons in the middle, and perhaps someday to his laughing grandson aswell. Inside, readers will learn how he is beating stiff odds to pass the business on to a third generation. Brokering such a high risk handoff is the forte of CIGNA Financial Advisors, the featured story in this issue.

Some magazine cover pictures feature effective symbols that can both lure the reader inside and sum up a story as well. Such is the case in a recent issue of Highroads, the magazine of AAA Arizona (Phoenix, Ariz.).

This auto club wants its members to travel. The nostalgic picture of an antique gasoline pump evokes the discoveries of travel. Escape to yesterday, the picture says to its viewers. The rest is left to their imaginations. They can nurture travel dreams by going inside to read more.

Our final example of a visually literate magazine cover picture is from another issue of CIGNA's The Business of Caring. Unlike the other three examples, this one is photojournalistic in nature, an intimate, close-up candid portrait rich in hard-hitting, credible human values that CIGNA employees can certainly identify with. A 31-word blurb, nearly a mini-story in itself, adds critical context that tells them who this potential CIGNA client is, and why he looks so thoughtful. His expression fits the high-stakes nature of the story inside.

Philip N. Douglis, ABC, is director of The Douglis Visual Workshops, now in its 30th year of training communicators in visual literacy. Douglis, an IABC Fellow, is the most widely known consultant on editorial photography for organizations. He offers a comprehensive six-person Communicating with Pictures workshop every May and October in Oak Creek Canyon, near Sedona, Arizona.