TIME: Top Ten Magazine Covers of 2008
By Arthur Hochstein
1. The New Yorker, Nov. 17, 2008
....(T)his list could easily be filled with just (New Yorker) covers. But I'll stick to one: the cover that ran immediately after the presidential election. The illustration by Bob Staake shows the moon cleverly hollowed out to form the O in the magazine's name — and in the president-elect's — casting its glow over the Lincoln Memorial....Why is the cover great? It doesn't do a victory dance. Rather, it whispers to the reader...."Everything's okay now — we have our country back." It's set at night, a time when creepy things happen, but also a time when people sleep, safe and sound. It is beautifully rendered. Simply spectacular.
2. New York, March 24, 2008
....When news broke linking New York governor Eliot Spitzer to a call girl, New York hired noted conceptual artist Barbara Kruger who took a benign portrait by Henry Leutwyler and created scathing commentary by overlaying her signature red rectangle with white type....
3. Rolling Stone, July 10, 2008
"Less is More!" is the battle cry of modernists and modernist designers the world over. In magazine land, especially on covers, art directors are constantly trying to convince editors to use less, or smaller, type — and for good reason. A cover at its best speaks through the power of imagery. Magazines usually reserve this treatment for monumental occasions, or for the death of icons. This Rolling Stone cover, with a charming photo of Obama by Peter Yang, speaks through pure imagery to announce several things: The magazine unabashedly supports Barack (duh!) and, since it has already made clear its support, is going to give the reader a more personal side of the candidate. The carefully selected image, likely an outtake, tells the reader he's not just The One, he's one of us as well. Obama is responding to something, so there's a conversation going on, and his unguarded demeanor invites us in for a closer look. The cover also breaks the conventional wisdom that the best cover pictures must have eye contact with the reader. So can cover designers drop the type, pick an unusual image and be completely successful? Yes, we can.
4. Entertainment Weekly, Oct. 3, 2008
When The New Yorker ran its Barry Blitt-illustrated cover cheekily portraying Michelle and Barack Obama as fist-bumping radical terrorists, it touched off a firestorm....Amid all the hubbub came Entertainment Weekly, whose cover subjects, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, make their livings by pointing out the pervasive folly of the political process. By spoofing the original New Yorker cover, this one actually trumps it. In addition to making the reader (me, anyway) laugh out loud, it wryly comments on the controversy. In comedy, timing is everything, and the timing, spirit and execution of this cover made it stand out, and even helped defuse the rancor unintentionally created by the original. Bravo!....
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2008/top10/article/0,30583,1855948_1863163,00.html
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