Covers
08.12.10
posted by Robert Newman
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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