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richardturley:

Japanese Earthquake Cover

Major news events make for exciting times at news magazines/newspapers. The rush of a story breaking, it developing around you, the adrenalised feeling of seeing a bit of history unfold and the focus needed to grasp it, process it and make sense of it for the reader in the context of his/her experience. 

Coupled with that, the competitive nature of EVERY SINGLE EDITOR I HAVE EVER WORKED WITH to feel that they have handled the story the best, got the definitive story, the best piece of analysis, the best pictures, the best cover. This makes for a lot of work, a lot of discussion and a lot of not leaving the office and eating takeaway pizza.

And I don’t mean to knock that. The desire to serve your readers best is fundamental to the success of any publication. Especially as a consequence of the public interest in the given event, readership tends to swell too, so it’s a good opportunity to show off your journalism in the hope that new readers come back again.

For me, this cover was initiated in a phone call with Josh. He knew he didn’t want a picture, there were already too many, too much noise. We wanted something quieter and more solemn. We talked about more elaborate illustration, but Noma Bar jumped quickly to mind. Noma needs no introduction. Has a very cool head when it comes down to finding the idea in it’s simplest form.

So by the time I got back to New York on Tuesday, Noma had sent a load of roughs through. (Apart from the standard of his work being so high, the other great thing about Noma is he gives you about 10 ideas, which is pretty rare for an illustrator). The quake shaped like a screaming face in the rising sun seemed the strongest.

It was such a simple idea that we thought no words on the cover aside from the logo. We rolled back a bit from that, putting ‘Crisis in Japan’ at the top, Christian Schwartz doing some custom work matching our logotype (its a slightly condensed version of our 95 setting).

We spotted late in the day that our flap offered another opportunity for us to play with the readers a bit, by covering the quake/face in the sun up, to be revealed when the flap opens, so we had Noma redraw the face to take advantage of this, moving the quake/face to the left to be obscured by the flap. Putting loads of words in the flap seemed wrong too, to the flap became a black curtain with minimal type, just the contents small at the base of the page.

So here is the flap (#1), then without (#2), then our standard newstand version (#3, with the more central quake/face and slightly larger logo). With no disrespect to Noma, there are many other iterations of rising suns out there. I think ours/is the only one where the quake is screaming. Though just typing this sentence almost guarantee’s I will be wrong about this..