Best magazine covers



When I saw that the American Society of Magazine Editors had come up with a list of the top 40 magazine covers of the last 40 years, it was pretty fun to guess what would have been included. My own picks would've been:
  • George Lois' work for Esquire back in the day still remains one of the peaks of magazine cover design, and the ASME list itself has the equivalent of Titanic hogging the Oscars - 3 Lois covers are in the top 10. My favourite Lois covers are the usual suspects: "The Passion of Muhammad Ali" (#3, and for my money the greatest magazine cover ever), the Vietnam "Oh my god - we hit a little girl" one (#8), and the Sonny Liston as Santa one, which is not in the top 40 probably only because it's not made in the last 40 years (it dates to 1962). The last top 10 Lois cover is of course that of Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell's.
  • The New Yorker's Saul Steinberg one (#4) and "Newyorkistan" one (#14) - the list though reminded me of how good Art Spiegelman's September 2001 post-9/11 cover of the New Yorker was.
  • Life's man on the moon one (#13)
  • Time's "Is God Dead?" one (#12); I also recall their Scientology expose one very clearly.
And of course the famous Demi Moore pregnancy pic for Vanity Fair makes it there (at #2, no less), but one of my favourite Vanity Fair covers is actually the Gretchen Mol one

Comments

Eric "Babe" Morse said…
Didn't know if you'd seen this. Some see it as a rip-off. To me, it's a blatant homage.
http://socialitelife.com/mt/archives/radar_magazines_new_cover_boy_tom_cruise.php
28 October 2005 at 06:21
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