The October Vanity Fair is off the newsstands now, so I can finally post the page I wrote and designed for the issue’s Vanities section. It’s Rupert Murdoch’s profile on Richbook, the Facebook spinoff for the ridiculously affluent. (I’ve been angling for an invite, but my bank account isn’t anywhere near big enough.) Among Murdoch’s friends: Paris Hilton, Arianna Huffington, Charles Foster Kane, Dick Cheney, Pope Benedict XVI, Kirk Kirkorian, Joss Whedon, Leona Helmsley’s dog, and a handful of arrivistes. I think this is readable at this size, but just barely; you can click on the image for a bigger version.

Here’s an excellent treat, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to find for years. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is a shot-for-shot remake that two Mississippi kids made over the course of eight years in the 1980s. A few weeks ago a complete copy was floating around on one of those secret BitTorrent sites. Here’s the first ten minutes. (The audio level is low throughout, so you may have to turn up the volume.) Enjoy.

Jim Windolf wrote about the remake in the 2004 Vanity Fair feature “Raiders of the Lost Backyard.” That same year, the producer Scott Rudin bought the rights to the boys’ story, and Daniel Clowes is apparently working on a script (or he was at one point, anyway).

From Vanity Fair’s website, an amazing slide show of lobby cards—”the gorgeous promotional posters that were a common sight in movie theaters from the early 20th century through the 1960s.” They’re from the collection of the late screenwriter Leonard Schrader, the brother of screenwriter-director Paul Schrader.

The slide show itself is here; Peter Biskind’s introductory essay is here.

To read more about this incredible trove of Hollywood ephemera, visit the collection’s official site.

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

Other outtakes are here and here.

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.

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.

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…