Here’s an outtake from my December 2005 Vanity Fair assignment:

Other outtakes are here and here.

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categories: The Magazine Covers

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Remember The Great Magazine-Cover Spree of 2005-2006? In the fall of 2005, Vanity Fair approached me to do some fresh covers for the magazine’s Vanities section. I worked on a bunch of concepts for them, and four new covers eventually appeared in the December 2005 issue. Here they are; I’ve never posted them before. A few of these have been modified slightly from the published versions.

The hed was “The Celebrity Invasion,” and the dek was “V.F. samples a few of the new star-studded magazines on the drawing boards.”

(“Esquire” doesn’t have an “n” in it, so I created one by chopping out the “u” and rotating it 180 degrees. Whee…)

Outtakes from the assignment are here, here, and here.

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Thanks to something Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes created, the October issue of Vanity Fair has gotten a little bit of attention. The issue also contains something I created: a fake cover flap you can cut out and attach to a newsstand copy of The Weekly Standard. It’s on page 272, in the Vanities section. More details are here.

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(You know how sometimes you get an idea for a magazine cover, and you sit down and create it, and it makes you laugh, but then you think, Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t post this, because it’s kind of in bad taste? And then you put it aside for a while? And then two or three months later you revisit it, and you find yourself thinking, Hmm, why not post this? And then you spend some time redesigning it, and then you upload it to your server? Like this?)

(The main coverline font is Tobias Frere-Jones’s lovely and ubiquitous Gotham, which you can buy from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)

(Go to this page for more covers like this.)

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In recent months, the celebrity weeklies have been all pregnancy, all the time. So on some level this makes sense:

(Go to this page for more stuff like this.)

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categories: Art and Design, Film, Magazines, The Magazine Covers

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Yesterday Gawker expressed bafflement regarding Russ Smith’s assertion in The New York Press that Gawker Media has been sold to The New York Times Company for $32 million. “As this is utterly ridiculous and unequivocally not true,” Gawker wrote, “we imagine Smith intended the piece as some sort of quasi-parody.”

But Smith, as unhinged as he most certainly is, may be onto something. A well-placed source inside the Times sent me a screenshot of an in-house mockup of Gawker redesigned to conform to the look, feel, and editorial tone of the Times Company’s flagship website. It’s not a pretty thing: Something is definitely lost when the snarkiness of Gawker is filtered through the bland, establishment-friendly tone of the Times. Let’s hope this deal doesn’t actually go through—it would mean the end of Gawker as we know it. Click on the logotype below to see the rest of this top-secret design.

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A couple of months ago an editor at Vanity Fair approached me to see if I wanted to try to come up with something for VF. It worked out pretty nicely: I have a page of four new magazine covers in the December 2005 issue. The issue is on newsstands now; it’s the one with Kate Moss on the front. I can’t post the four covers here, at least not yet, but I will tease you with the logotype for one of them:

For the rest of this cover, plus three other brand-new ones, see page 288 of the December Vanity Fair. I’m excited to be in the same publication as this guy and these guys, among other fine contributors.

[UPDATE: In August 2007, I finally posted all four covers.]

During the process, I submitted a few design concepts that we decided not to pursue, including an earlier version of the cover below, wherein genetic material from this magazine has been spliced into the DNA of this magazine. I reimagined most of this one over the weekend, so it’s more or less oven-fresh. (As you’ll discover if you check out Vanity Fair, a different but related concept did make it into the magazine.)

This cover I posted a few weeks ago is also an outtake from the Vanity Fair assignment. Yes, I know: Too many boob jokes recently. But sex sells magazines!

I probably won’t be doing too many more of these covers—I want to start doing more stuff like this. I have one other cover in mind that I’m planning to create and post in February, for reasons that shall become clear…

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As Matt Haber observed last week, the cover of Radar’s September/October issue was art directed by George Lois, the advertising genius who created dozens of classic Esquire covers between 1962 and 1972. The new Radar cover is a parody of a Lois Esquire creation that caused a big controversy in early 1968.

Here’s what no one’s noticed yet: For some time now, George Lois has been happily recycling his old Esquire covers for a bunch of other magazines. The one below is on the newsstand right now. Click on the image to see the Lois original.

[This post originally contained two more George Lois riffs, but I don’t think they worked as well as the one above, so I took them down…]

(Go to this page for more stuff like this.)

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At a joint press conference yesterday at 666 Broadway, Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs and Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham announced a historic collaboration between their two companies: the iPod Harper’s Special Edition.

“This merging of two iconic designs is exactly the sort of innovation that has made Steve Jobs the most dynamic businessman of his generation,” said Lapham. “From the tasteful use of the Goudy Old Style typeface to the reproduction of my signature on the back, this gadget perfectly captures the essence of the Harper’s brand—and the sound quality is nothing short of Brahms-worthy. I am thrilled to lend the magazine’s name to this ingenious device.”

“The iPod Harper’s Special Edition is a perfect combination of form, function, literary merit, and antiplutocratic politics,” said Jobs. “The massive hard drive and crisp full-color screen are ideal for storing and displaying photographs, and each unit comes preloaded with high-resolution photos of every writer whose work has appeared in the magazine during Lewis’s long tenure: Thomas Frank, Barbara Ehrenreich, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen—even Christopher Hitchens, though you can easily delete that one if you want to.”

“Total storage space on the iPod Harper’s Special Edition, in gigabytes: 60,” said Lapham. “Amount each one will cost: $399.”

“Number of media legends who came together to create this exciting new Apple product: 2,” said Jobs. “Chance that literary-minded American consumers will find this new iPod impossible to resist: 1 in 1.”

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categories: Best Of, Magazines, Music and Audio, The Magazine Covers

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The creeps at Bad Touch Weekly have put Michael Jackson on the cover again. This must be BTW’s sixth or seventh Jacko cover in a row. Jeez.

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In their quest for newsstand “pop,” many magazines design their covers in such a way that the logotype is almost an afterthought. Titles of magazines are often partly blotted out by celebrity heads, torsos, hair, and other body parts. This April 2005 cover of Parents magazine demonstrates the perils of this design technique:

(Note that I never said this was the real cover. You can find a lot more of my designs on the Magazines category page.)

(Inspired partly by a brief moment in a recent episode of Arrested Development involving Buster and an alarm clock.)

UPDATE, June 2005: This cover escaped from its moorings several weeks ago and has traveled all over the net, creating a small urban legend in the process. See this June 14 post for the story of how Snopes.com stepped in to debunk it.

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Hey, check it out, a new magazine:

(I did this one in Quark.)

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Pea-brained thespian Sylvester Stallone has a new magazine out. Who would’ve guessed they’d go with such an allusive design?

[I reverse-engineered this in Photoshop this time—not in Quark, as I usually do. Here is the real cover of Sly.]

[Not sure what this is all about? Some insight can be gleaned here.]

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Because sometimes I play around with Quark when I’m bored.

(Go to this page for more stuff like this.)

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As Gawker noted in November, the American Gentrifier cover below appears on the flip side of the Winter 2005 issue of Stay Free!, the lefty cultural mag edited by the brilliant and hilarious Brooklyn resident Carrie McLaren. That’s me holding the baby; it was the first time I’d ever worn a Baby Bjorn, and it may well be the last. (The wife and baby are models too.)

I had nothing to do with the concept or design of this cover; I simply showed up at the photographer’s studio and did my best imitation of an emasculated Park Slope husband. The issue is being distributed free throughout Brooklyn at cafes and other establishments. If you’re rarely or never in Brooklyn, you can buy the issue for $2.95 at a number of bookstores around the country, including one of my favorites, Manhattan’s St. Mark’s Bookshop. The issue is also available via the Stay Free! website.

Carrie apparently thinks I look like the archetypal clueless yuppie, because this is the second time she’s enlisted me as a model for one of the parodies that appear on her magazine’s back cover. Four or five years ago, I appeared on the back of Stay Free! in an anti-S.U.V. parody:

Don’t you love how my belt doesn’t match my shoes? Carrie just marched me around the streets of SoHo posing me in front of parked S.U.V.s. They were everywhere. I was surprised to discover just how many of them there are. I have a driver’s license, but I rarely drive, so I’d never really had cause to notice them.

Carrie had this ad made into postcards, which you can buy on the Stay Free! website.

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