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.

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…

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.)

Could there be a more perfect encapsulation of the decline of American magazines than this gallery of all 857 Esquire covers since 1933? First look at 1966, a year when the brilliant graphic designer George Lois was churning out one iconic cover after another. Then go to 2004. Or almost any year since about 1981. It’s sad. Predictable, but sad.

The 1996 book Covering the 60’s: George Lois, the Esquire Era collects the best Esquire covers from that classic era, along with commentary by Lois himself.

In 2001 I wrote a column skewering Esquire and its editor, David Granger, for publishing a silly stunt article by Tom Junod.