This week’s issue just arrived in the mail, and it’s a keeper:

(Yes, I made this. For more stuff like it, see the magazine covers tag. The two primary fonts are Knockout and Mercury, both from the geniuses at Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)

More Potus info is here.

This Sarah Palin nomination is going great! And now she’s laid out her geopolitical philosophy in the new issue of Foreign Affairs.

(Yes, I made this. Go here for more stuff like it.)

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.

(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.)

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.)

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.

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…

I had no idea how bad things had gotten for Judith Miller until I saw the Ethicist column in this past Sunday’s Times Magazine. When is the Times finally going to rein in this crazy woman?

(Here’s a link to this week’s Ethicist column.)