Our cover story on Sunday was about the American soldiers accused of murdering Afghan civilians. Some reports have depicted them as a rogue unit, but our story goes deeper into the psyche of the American soldier and questions whether the killings are symptoms of a much larger issue. Being a weekly, time was a factor, so we executed some staff-produced, alternate versions of the magazine’s cover, two days before it had to ship. We started with a graphic approach, experimenting with every font in our arsenal. We did more than can be featured in this blog post, but the following is a curated depiction of our process for developing a cover.
We didn’t have a photograph that worked for the cover image, so we commissioned the designer Abbott Miller to do a type painting based on his acclaimed wallpaper paintings.
We loved what he came up with, but the editors wanted to use a longer cover line that, in drip letters, was not legible.
The cover above is set in our customized version of the Stymie typeface that was redrawn by the renowned typographer Matthew Carter.
Here we took a simple approach using a customized version of the font Theinhardt.
We tried filling the letters in blood.
Then we tried filling the entire cover in blood, but that seemed, well, too bloody.
While we were working on the graphic approaches, I asked our designer Sara Cwynar to begin experimenting with hand-lettering. She must have executed more than 20 versions right at her desk using an eye dropper, india ink and a tiny watercolor brush. Her first version had little soldiers around the type that added a nice texture but the cover still needed some color.
She tried an option with the type in red, but the depiction of blood felt forced, and we wanted something with more graphic impact. Plus the little soldiers looked like toys.
We then decided to see what the little soldiers looked like at a larger scale. We liked what we saw. The cover now had the impact that we were looking for without the typical clichés associated with war, like camouflage and bullet belts.
In the end we decided to beef up the type and add some color to the background (Pantone 185 to be precise). What may seem like a long, arduous process was actually a short, arduous process. The execution of the final cover happened within a period of two very intense days.