Covers: August 2010 Archives

ASME announces best magazine cover contest finalists!

ASME announces best magazine cover contest finalists!

The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) has announced the finalists for the annual 2010 Best Magazine Cover contest. There are six finalists in 12 categories. Winners will be selected by voters on Amazon.com; voting begins September 1, so be sure to vote for your favorites! Congratulations to all the finalists.

Pictured above are four groups of finalists. Row 1: Sexiest; Row 2: Entertainment and Celebrity; Row 3: Fashion and Beauty; Row 4: House and Home.


Cool Nerds Go Negative

Cool Nerds Go Negative

Wired and Scientific American must have called each other up before class this month!

I thought this was too random to pass up. I realize many genres of magazine verticals share similar cover strategies however these two popular titles, while they do share some DNA do not generally have anything close to the same cover idea dropping on the same month.
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Arthur Hochstein's 15 Favorite Time Magazine Covers

Arthur Hochstein's 15 Favorite Time Magazine Covers

Arthur Hochstein was the art director of Time magazine from 1994 to the end of 2009. He created over 1000 covers during that time, including some he did as deputy to Rudy Hoglund before 1994. Hochstein created what I consider the greatest contemporary body of cover design at any one magazine over the past 15 years. Hochstein's Time covers are by turns momentous, funny, pointed, provocative, intelligent, and highly creative. They feature the top photographers (and occasionally illustrators) in the business, along with Hochstein's own considerable creative Photoshop work. To my mind this is as close as contemporary American cover design will get to the legendary work of George Lois at Esquire in the 60s and 70s

Hochstein's Time covers skewed to the homemade, self-created. An early adapter to Photoshop, he created many of the images himself with stock and archival photography and found images (he used the same globe of the world from his office for at least six covers!). There's a sense of creativity, fun, excitement, passion, and ingenuity that is lacking from many of today's highly-scripted and tested magazine covers. I can remember sitting in Hochstein's Time office one afternoon a few years ago and watching him work on a cover on two computer screens, with a mouse in each hand, gleefully manipulating and changing the image. This is a person who loves the process of visual creation, and it comes through in the printed covers. Hochstein's bespoke imagery is reminiscent of much of the work currently appearing on the covers of alternative newsweeklies like The Dallas Observer, Riverfront Times, Miami New Times, and Westword, although with a much greater budget and resources.

While we await the inevitable book collection of his work, here is Arthur Hochstein on his favorite covers and how they came together. This is a great inside look at the sausage-making process of creating covers at the largest American newsweekly.


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Runner's World Goes to the Dogs

Runner's World Goes to the Dogs

September issues aren't only big for the fashion bibles, but the fitness books as well. Kory Kennedy, DD for Runner's World, sends along a cover shot better suited for a gatefold and this note:
At Runner's World we love runners of all shapes, sizes, and species.
See the full cover after the jump...
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Covering Google

Covering Google

Fortune magazine hits newsstands and debuts on the iPad with a bold question: Is Google Over? If so, what a wild ride its been since Stanford computer science grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin began collaborating on a search engine in 1996. 

Here's a look back at a collection of magazine covers featuring Google--most playing off Ruth Kedar's colorful logo. How different these covers would have been, had they gone with their original proposed name: BackRub.

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Collected Cover

Collected Cover "Inspiration"

Illustrator Brian Taylor has put together a blog dedicated to documenting magazine cover "inspiration," i.e., covers that look alike. It's called Doppelganger Design, and it includes some of the ones that we've been posting here at SPD the past couple weeks, and a lot more. Head over to his site immediately for much cover ripoff(?) fun.

Above: The New York Times T magazine and the cover from Coast that it "inspired."

Related stories:
Another "Inspiration?" Cover  New York / St. Louis
More "Inspired" Covers  Esquire / Wizard / Texas Monthly
Homage, Inspiration, or ...  TIME / The Village Voice
Rolling Stone: Deja Vu?  Friends / Glee
Inspiration, or...  New York / Seattle
More Inspiration...  Billboard / Mediaweek
Eat Cheap Eats  New York / Time Out New York

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