Soft Power Manifestations in TIME Magazine Cover Designs

Abstract

Abstract:

Soft power is considered one of the special strategies that are related to the political forces or wills of a country or entity with the aim of influencing others without using excessive force or coercion in the economic, social, political or cultural aspects in order to achieve its goals. It has various tools to achieve this, and the graphic design represented by the covers of international political magazines (the American TIME magazine) was one of the most prominent of these tools because the visual discourse of the magazine cover has features and creative cognitive dimensions that enabled it to be an effective tool to embody and pass on soft power messages in an influential way with the intention of convincing people of an idea. The focus of the research was to know how soft power appears in the designs of the covers of the American magazine (TIME)? In the first chapter, the second chapter (the theoretical framework) included the literature of the current research, as it dealt with the concept of soft power and its relationship with art and its interaction with culture, which represented the first topic. The second topic included soft power, graphic discourse, and persuasive methods in the magazine cover, leading to the third chapter, which included an analysis of sample models and their discussion according to the descriptive approach. As for the fourth chapter, the researcher identified the results represented in the contribution of methods related to the content of the design message in enhancing the persuasive power of the magazine’s graphic discourse to convey the goals of soft power through a set of effective methods, in addition to a set of conclusions represented in the possibility of transforming the elements of the design structure at the level of the formal components of the cover and the contents of the design message into means and mechanisms that enrich and strengthen the soft power discourse through the magazine cover.