Dueling Covers on the iPad

No matter how you tilt the iPad, as publication designers, the workload has increased. When it comes to covers, back in the old days (8 months ago) you "only" had to ship a newsstand and subscriber cover. Nowadays, add a portrait and landscape iPad cover to the mix.

A blessing or a curse? Looking at the August cover of WIRED, they took the opportunity to use an alternative photo of time traveling Will Ferrell. For the September issue, they took this one step further and used the ole "we love them both" approach: "The Web is dead." covers the print and portrait cover, while Joel McHale & "How to Watch TV" grace the landscape mode.

Wired Creative Director, Scott Dadich weighs in:

September was a case of having two great cover options an not having to decide which was better, as we are so often forced to in print. We worked with Art Streiber to shoot Joel McHale for our TV package, and we shot both motion and still.

And we had Chris And Michael Wolff writing for our Death of the Web package, which we felt really good about as a provocative Wired cover. So we took our August Will Ferrell issue--one step further and decided to have the best of both worlds. This is all so new, it's fun to do away with convention and experiment with new ways to engage with our readers. I'm hopeful that they appreciate the extra content we're putting into the digital edition.