Cover of the Week: Shortlist 27/1/11

Well it didn't take Shortlist long this year to grab a Cover of the Week award. This has to be the most impressive launch in the mens magazine market in the last 5+ years and continues to amuse and delight me on a regular basis.

Tragically for commercial reasons, it came hidden beneath a wrap around ad spread for an instantly forgetable film (see? I've forgotten what it was already...), but all self-respecting editors and designers will rip that off to display the mag the way its rather talented art director Chris Deacon intended.

What's to like here? Well there's the boldness of the concept, the use of Elton's glasses in the 'O' and the brilliant coverline 'Elton John. Exclusive interview. Need we say more?' to name but three.

But there is something else going on here which I think we can all learn from. Fact is Elton these days aint looking his best - wrinkles and wigs are not a great combo, no matter how famous you are - so a pic of the man as he looks today is not going to cut any mustard. Use a pic of him from 30 years ago and you're undermining the impact of having a brand new interview.

Instead Deacon has taken a step back from his mac and said: 'You know what - to get maximum impact on the cover from our Elton John interview, let's NOT use a picture of Elton John. Let's do it another way.'

Genius.

Eat Me - tastier than Jamie?

No way will food culture mag Eat Me (now on its fourth issue) outsell the celeb endorsed Jamie, but I think it's a stronger and more likeable product from a purely editorial perspective.

There's none of the self-congratulatory back slapping and crass attempts to sell you a JO endorsed salt and paper grinder set here. This looks and feels like a mag that is being written and produced by an editorial team that is doing it for the love of it. The editor is Max Wilson and his background in graphics and design are obvious on every page.

The Heston cover shoot by Ben Ottewell is a good 'un, as is the one with Nuno Mendes by Alexander Missen.

One grumble - it's followed Jamie down the matt paper route, which seems odd. To me, the pictures in Jamie invariably look cold and way too black thanks to the paper - the last thing you want from food photography.

Good luck to the Eat Me team - it won't be easy to make money from this mag but it deserves to survive.

Cover of the Week: Wired, February 2011 issue

I'm not sure at what point Wired took over from Wallpaper* as the magazine most likely to be found on designers' desks in my office, but it is well and truely established now as the mag most likely to get name-checked when we are discussing new ways to tell old stories. It's also become the first mag I choose to take with me on a long train journey.

The UK launch wasn't 100% commercially successful - it only hit its circulation target of 50,000 in the Jan-Jun '10 ABCs by giving away 10,000 copies a month (20% of its total circulation!) - but far be it from me to slag off a UK publisher trying to launch a newsstand mag during the current recession. It isn't easy, as we all know and Wired is a great read.

I haven't loved every one of their covers, but I think this one is a cracker. I get plenty of very visual subjects to play with on my covers but for David Rowan at Wired, more than half of his cover stories feature concepts that it is next to impossible to illustrate.

This month it's 'social commerce' - how big business is trying to flog stuff to you and your mates via Facebook. Hardly the easiest of concepts to bring to life.

Instead of attempting something literal - and lame - the art team have gone for a very bold graphic cover with not one but three headlines explaining the story. I also like the fact that they've dropped the 'launch of the year' flash a lot earlier than many other mags would have done. Fair play to David Rowan and team.

Cover of the Week: Tatler, February 2010 issue

OK, so Warhol-style images have been done a million times before on covers and elsewhere, but this one is the perfect example of 'right person, right time'.

There was obviously an element of luck here but to produce this cover on the day Kate and Wills announced details of their wedding (on Twitter - why???) was a fantastic bit of work by Tatler. It not only got great standout on the newsstand but was also picked up and reproduced all over the news media to illustrate the story about Kate using a car not a carriage to get to the Abbey (shock horror...).

It was clearly a brave decision to go down this road - it's a million miles away from the usual Tatler covers - and was a clever solution to the obvious problem anyone is going to have producing an original cover featuring Kate Middleton - she isn't going to be agreeing to any exclusive magazine photo shoots any time soon.

The graphic art was by David Newton. Haven't had the pleasure of working with David yet but he has a great list of magazine clients, including Wired and Esquire so feels like a guy my picture editor should be speaking too.

First issue - The Face, May 1980

We all know how rare it is for a first issue to really hit the spot. Time is the usual killer - I arrived to edit one new launch a few years ago to discover the publisher had left 50 editorial pages blank for me to fill with 'great ideas'. We were three weeks from going to press - I should have walked out and left them to it, but thought the magazine was going to be a winner (it wasn't) so stayed put.

Anyway, what this is leading towards is an appreciation of a truely brilliant first issue that I pulled out of my files this morning to give me some inspiration for the new year. Didn't work on this one - wish I had!

It's issue one of The Face, May 1980, and features the enigmatic Jerry Dammers of The Specials on the cover (shot by Chalkie Davies). Dammers was the subject of intense interest at my school as his dad Horace was the dean of the cathedral which hosted our morning assemblies. An odd father-son pairing to say the least...

A couple of things that still leave me open mouthed at their brilliance more than 30 years on from the magazine's launch (apart from the masthead...):

Madness in NYC: Jill Furmanovsky

• the quality of the photography by Jill Furmanovsky (Madness) and John Lydon (Anton Corbijn/Sheila Rock)
• The quality of the writing by Adrian Thrills, Vaughn Toulouse and Julie Burchill




John Lydon: Sheila Rock



Jill described her shoot with Madness for issue one like this: "There was a cultural difference between Madness and America. I remember the baffled faces of the welcoming committee at Warner Brothers Records when the band exploded out of the elevator, fell as one to their knees, and began ’worshiping’ the company logo woven into the carpet."