Two Designers Walk Into a Bar · Evergreen Podcasts

Politicians, Superheroes and Stars - Noteworthy Magazine Covers

·56 min·3 clips

George Lois’s “Nixon’s Last Chance” turned Richard Nixon into a makeup session during the 1968 campaign.

Magazines still mattered. Todd and Elliot start with the old promise of the cover: a rectangle in the mail or on the stand that could make someone look famous, doomed, or suddenly hard to ignore. The setup stays loose. They bring stacks to the bar, joke about not being antisocial, and treat the pile like pop culture evidence with better typography. Covers did real work. They shouted from newsstands, landed in mailboxes, and turned a feature into a weird public scoreboard. Then the map shows up. The strongest stretch digs into a New Yorker cover built around a distorted view of the world from New York. Cartography, but with a smirk. Start at 9th Avenue, and 10th Avenue, the Hudson River, New Jersey, and everything after that gets shoved into the distance. Kansas City just hangs there. Chicago, Nebraska, Las Vegas, Utah, Mexico, Canada, Los Angeles, the Pacific Ocean, Japan, Russia, and China become labels in a world sized by New York ego. The joke is visual arrogance. One host calls it an artistic representation of distorted importance, a perception joke that makes scale do the satire. The riff keeps moving. They promise to put the cover on the website, because some magazine design needs eyes on it, not just a description. Then comes the family tree. The cover was parodied by The Economist, Mad, and The New Yorker itself, which somehow makes the self-parody feel earned. Good jokes travel. They also point out that the visual gag was lifted without authorization in plenty of pop-culture places, which is cover immortality with paperwork attached. The history goes backward too. Steinberg did not pull the device out of thin air; John T. McCutcheon's 1928 Chicago Tribune illustrations come up as an earlier inspiration. By the end, the hosts are still riffing about covers, drinks, and tearing off the best bits for future placemats.

As heard by us

A sharp, object-level tour of magazine covers as cultural status symbols and visual jokes.

It treats magazine covers as public statements, objects that had to work on a newsstand and keep working in a mailbox. The conversation moves from the wider cultural force of magazines to a close reading of one New Yorker cover, and it is at its best when it keeps the visual…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want one famous magazine cover to turn into a sharp, amused design-history hangout.

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