BusinessWeek Cover

Over the last year, BusinessWeek has emerged as a vanguard of cover and feature magazine design. Despite dealing with material traditionally associated with stuffiness, BusinessWeek has made a mark with forward looking graphic images.

I say that rather disingenuously, as you have guessed, because they called me last friday to do a cover image about the head of Facebook, not Mark Zuckerberg the founder, but Sheryl Sandberg, the CEO. The Art Director Richard Turley, was looking for something that had the look of my sketchbook pages, doodled and dense with zany imagery.

BusinessWeek closes on Wednesdays, and I sent a sketch in on Monday, so we had very little time for changes. The only catch was that the photo shoot was taking place Tuesday afternoon. So I had to do the drawing without any real sense of what the image was that my drawings would be accompanying. The AD sent me a rough idea of how he imagined the cover photo will be arranged, to help me get a general layout for my sketch.

I sent them the completed drawing on Tuesday afternoon without color tones once the photo came in, and it did not look as good as we expected in the smaller crop. Having her larger and intersecting the edges of the type boxes was the better solution. This would require some Photoshop surgery to get everything to fit, including the headline, which had lost it's real estate to the redesigned photo. 

Richard used these colored bars to highlight the problem areas with this new photo. I added some new drawings to clutter the empty spaces and used my digital lasso to get make the fit work just right. 

This is how the drawing looked without the photo on top of it, once the final digital edits were made.
Below are some detail images of the drawing. It was a great project, that ended with a flurry of drawing and anxiety as I once again lived up to the name of my blog. Thanks to all the great art directors and designers at Business Week!