Behind the Scenes: Innovating the Innovation Issue Arem Duplessis, design director: Magazine covers are like highway billboards: you have only a few seconds to capture the reader's attention. The idea needs to be good and quick. But once we decided to do a split run of four different covers for this week's Innovation Issue, with each cover featuring a different innovation, it wasn't enough to be good - we needed to do something big too. So, since The New York Times Magazine logo has never been through a drastic change in the publication's 116-year history, we asked various outside designers to rethink our logo for this one issue. What follows is an account of how that process and other parts of the magazine's design unfolded. Gail Bichler, art director: For the logo redesign, our goal was to collaborate with firms and individuals who would bring an unconventional approach to the project. Experience working on big brands was certainly a plus. Our final selection included an ad agency, an illustrator, a typographer and several designers and studios with clients ranging from Coca-Cola to Chanel. I contacted the participants and asked them to think of this as experimental, rather than an effort to refine the existing logo. The only other constraints were that it had to be legible and say "The New York Times Magazine." All in all, we received 69 proposals with participants submitting as many as 34 and as few as one. Some took an earnest approach; others were playful. The challenge then became reducing the pool of designs to eight. We gave a lot of consideration to the ideas behind the designs, but we also thought about what would work best with our format, about the group as a whole - we wanted visual and conceptual variety - and, of course, about the aesthetics. Of the final eight selections, here are the four selected for the print covers. The other four finalists appear inside the magazine. Because the different versions of the magazine are being distributed randomly, four neighboring subscribers can potentially receive four different covers. Now, on to the magazine's interior. The directive from the editorial department was to package the issue as "a day in the life." At first we figured we should have a central character who would drive his car, spend a day at work and play a little, all the while using a featured innovation. We named him Igor. Here's Arem's initial sketch: As we moved forward, however, Igor proved more and more difficult. Focusing on one character was too rigid. So we decided instead to use typeface treatments to introduce things. Sara Cwynar, designer: This issue started with my being handed a big, ever-changing list of innovations, from a shampooing robot to a sensor that might save your life in a car accident. My job was to figure out how to fit all of these various notions into 10 magazine pages, in a visually exciting yet coherent way. I first pulled inspiration from old school textbooks (particularly from the sciences), encyclopedias and indexes of all sorts. I also compiled contemporary examples of this type of design. Daily planners and agendas were consulted to see how we might evoke the idea of moving through one's day. And I studied the work of one of my design heroes, Massimo Vignelli, who designed the New York Subway Map. We settled on the use of colored pages that would evoke the way light changes through the day. Another challenge was that many of our innovations do not exist yet and thus can't be photographed. This dictated a more conceptual and illustrative approach to our visuals. But that complicated the puzzle: 32 small stories all had to fit together. Sometimes fitting a story into the layout came down to one word here or there, which meant a lot of back and forth with the editors working on the issue. For me, the biggest challenge was keeping all the ideas organized as they changed. I was updating versions of the list every two hours, and probably wrote about 100 to-do lists on Post-it notes. Chris Nosenzo, illustrator: The illustrations were defined mostly by the medium in which they were created: Adobe Illustrator. Because it is capable of creating "perfect forms," I used perfect circles for curves, kept angles at either 90 or 45 degrees and maintained strict symmetry and order. As a result, the drawings took on highly simplistic, even naïve, forms. The cute robo-kitty, for instance, is made almost entirely from circles - chopped, rotated, scaled and overlapped. When working on the drawings for the issue I made many versions of the same image, duplicating and reworking them over and over again. Here's how one illustration, the slide monster we created for one cover, evolved. It began with a drawing from Arem: Next I made my own drawing of it: Then I completed a first version for the magazine: Finally, I made a different version for the inside spread: When this version generated even more enthusiasm than the cover version, we ditched the dinosaur for the crocodile and that was that - a slide monster was born. Finally, here are a few design outtakes we were sad couldn't make it into the issue: And here's a wall in our office, which now includes the four innovation covers among other recent issues of the magazine: