I've been a long time fan of GQ, and have always appreciated the type work put into making the front covers. After finding the GQ magazine cover archive, I dove head in to 529 covers, picking the ones for their design and layout work instead of which celebrity was featured. Pretty amazing collection, I have to say.
They gradually transitioned from a heavy text and linear graphic usage to a cleaner and more trimmed look, going form serif to sans-serif and even losing the thin outline around the G and the Q starting in October of 1983. Then around early 1995 they decided to do a little bit of a shadow behind the lettering, but then moved past that phase around 2000 and went back to solid lettering. Right near the end of 2001 they started using the lighter opacity as it is seen on the cover today, in addition to using typographical symbols like bolded asterisks,positive signs, and angle brackets.
Images credited and belonging to GQ
