1948-1973: The slick look
The slick magazine look didn't crystallize until the late 40s/early 50s. Its roots were in the fashion magazine of the 20s. Vanity Fair and Vogue, where advertising and editorial art directors worked together on the new language of fashion photography/page display.
Bauhaus designers, fleeing Nazi Germany in the 30s, joined American ad agencies and magazine staff, where they introduced bleeds (photographs or art that extended to the edge of the page), and a new sense of page design that ignored traditional margins and bookish decorativeness in favor of crisper immediacy. There weren't frames around the pictures anymore; readers were sucked into the scene of each spread.
Influential art directors at Esquire, Holiday, Playboy, Look and McCall's refined the contemporary magazine style in the 50s. They used bigger pictures, experimented with headlines to get more informal effects, and jumped the gutter (ran pictures or headlines across the centerfold of a two page spread).
At first, the slick look was purely a highbrow consumer phenomenon, a representation of new attitudes about quality. Vogue in particular, for all its evocation of upperclass pretension, made that pretension accessible to wave after wave of newcomers (and also to people who turned their back on it, like "youthquaker" Edie Sedgwick). Like the "Creative Revolution" in advertising that followed it in the 1960s, the slick look signified a further democratization of style and substance alike, a sense that audiences as well as information producers would henceforth be chosen on merit, and not appointed merely because they represented a social class.
But it wasn't long before the slick look gravitated even to trade magazines. The typical look was that of Psychology Today. New magazines all looked the same, and adopted the same tone. They distinguished themselves only by carving out narrow consumer-group content niches: Runners, weight-lifters, dog lovers, model train builders, music lovers, computer owners, knitters, home restorers, and so on. People turned to magazines in a much more prosaic way, to identify (through them) with communities of interest, rather than communities of identity.
In the early 1970s, one magazine established itself as a general-interest vehicle for describing identity in a mass-medium-dominated world. It enjoyed one of the most popular magazine launches in history. Its name was People.
By the time People came along, however, the magazine form was largely moribund -- waiting (as it would for 20 years) for a technology like the xerox machine, and then the web, to shake it up.
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