In his letter to readers, TIME Editor in Chief Sam Jacobs wrote on Monday this week: “Much has changed since 2001, when creative director D.W. Pine produced his first cover for TIME....Across all that change, one thing has not: week after week, D.W. has overseen the creation of our cover. Today, we publish the 1,000th cover created by D.W., who first joined TIME in 1998 from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution....D.W. will tell you that creativity comes from working within limits. Over the decades, the cover has developed a few consistent guidelines: The printed cover size is 8 by 10.5 in. With few exceptions, it is contained within a red border, and the magazine’s logo has remained pretty much the same since the 1990s.”
Jacobs continues: “We’ve learned from D.W. there’s no end to what one can do when staying within those constraints. In 2018, 958 drones were sent into the sky, each emitting TIME’s iconic shade of red, to illuminate the night and create the largest TIME cover in history….Working with artists, D.W. has made cover images from fire, water, and sand…. In 2020, D.W. oversaw the creation of 100 covers for a single issue, our inaugural Women of the Year project....While some covers can take months to make, some take minutes. D.W.’s strongest covers are often the simplest. We woke up the morning after the Donald Trump–Joe Biden presidential debate to a half dozen versions of what finally became the panic cover we published later that day. Sometimes, saying just a little can leave the biggest impression.”
You can read more here.
Keep up-to-date with publishing news: sign up here for InPubWeekly, our free weekly e-newsletter.
