What goes into designing
a magazine cover?
Every designer should be so lucky as to work with a great client like Steve Schultz, Associate Dean of Communications at Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. Ever since we agreed that we should avoid portraits of individuals who come and go at the school, and focus on organizing the content of the magazine around a theme which would then be illustrated with conceptual art in 2005, we’ve collaborated on 40 covers together. Adopting the French concept of bricolage, using what is at hand to make something, I’ve recently begun to make the covers into little animations for my own motion practice and to promote the magazine. This cover, for the Spring 2025 issue, is one of my favorites. In fact, I even received an internal “Spot” award, which “recognize one-time exceptional achievements or contributions to the University mission above and beyond one’s normal job responsibilities.”
Step One of our established process is a meeting where all the writers are invited and talk about the stories they’re in the process of researching and writing and what art they’ve been able to collect. This gives me a sense of the nuances of the theme. After this meeting, I usually a little brain warm-up , generally a quick Google image search is mainly for learning what’s already out there and how to stand out from the crowd. After mulling over what I’ve seen, I look at my notes to see if there are some research stories that might yield some promising visual ideas. I often make a typographic themed illustration for the EQuad News, so I decide that the origami and maybe the polymer forms might be promising since I can imagine transforming them into type.
I like to pick up a pencil and sketch – I’m a bit old school that way. Pencil on paper just feels like commitment-free thinking, whereas jumping right into digital image-making feels a little hasty.
Composition time! Above are my first attempts at putting together what I’ve learned from visual research and sketching. All the forms were drawn by me. I initially didn’t include the top comp because I felt that the word “Create” didn’t take up enough space, that it didn’t have a strong presence on the page. Feedback from Steve suggested that the second row of comps, while colorful and eye-catching, were not readable enough. The polymer form concept didn’t seem to elicit enough enthusiasm, so I abandoned that idea.
Second volley of comps based on feedback that the folded paper letterforms did not look enough like letters. I used Adobe stock letters to see if maybe it could improve the readability issue. Steve and I agreed that while they were definitely more readable, they didn’t say “origami” enough.
More research lead to Jo Nakashima’s channel on YouTube. Even though I like to joke that as a graphic designer three dimensions is one dimension too many for me to handle, I thought these origami forms would make a great photographic cover. I photographed them from various angles, like from above, but I liked how monumental they looked and the in-the-thick-of-the-creative-process feeling it gave. The imperfections of my letters even gives a prototype energy, just like a school of engineering should give. Various cutting boards were used as backdrops and luckily, my personal cutting board was green
on one side and black on the other, which gave me more options. I didn’t love the green version —somehow the color combination reminds me of of football turf, and while the light blue version was okay, it didn’t have enough contrast or drama. A colleague remarked that the black had a more high-tech look, so we went for that version. Matt Raspanti, a terrific photographer, was kind enough to do the photography for the final version.
Planning the animation
Left: my notes on key poses, just to get my head around how the letters should fold themselves. I also made a storyboard, but I wasn’t satisfied with how I adapted a vertical cover to a horizontal format.
Below: All the puppets (or as I affectionately call them, “stunt doubles”) were constructed out of origami paper and florist’s wire so they could be easily posed. They’re all tidy in their labeled sandwich bags, ready for their close up.
The animatic
I learned that all six letters couldn’t easily fit on the cutting board “stage” so I’d have to shoot all of the letters separately and recompose them onto the blank background in After Effects.
Right, the BTS: A few timelapse seconds of me arranging the letters for what would become the rough animatic. I eventually realized that I needed to shoot the letters individually and silhouette them all in Photoshop, individual frame by individual frame. I shot over 334 photos, mainly on my iPhone, for this motion project. I estimate probably 35-40% didn’t end up being used in the final.
Making the puppets
My stunt doubles were all constructed out of a standard 6”x6” one-sided origami paper, cut in half. For each letter, I folded one version for every major change of direction, or fold and stuck a piece of florist’s wire with scotch tape along the axis of the fold so the puppet would stay in position during the shoot. I made stands with a coil of armature wire and ABS hollow square bar rods, and used adhesive putty to stick them onto these stands. I occasionally had to fold more puppets during shooting if I didn’t feel that the next puppet quite illustrated the next movement, or I needed more of a transition between two steps. I made over 84 puppets for this 15-second video.
I’m almost embarrassed about the next steps—I have a tendency to do things by brute force. I shot over 300 photos because it was too difficult to imagine the movement of 5 letters simultaneously, so they were shot one letter at a time. And because they were shot one at a time, I silhouetted each frame in Photoshop and composited them on the cutting board background, which I had to reshoot since I didn’t get a frame of an empty cutting board.
Since most of the frames were pngs, it was just a matter of placing them in the right order and on a consistent axis in After Effects. (OK, I also placed shadows and light reflections underneath to make the letters seem like real objects with volume. CC Slant was my best friend here, along some transforming, layer parenting, and heavy Gaussian blur.) The folding motion was a hover, and then a bounce onto the baseline. I like the choppy quality of the motion, and seriously considered my colleague, Sean Gallagher’s suggestion that I add metal sfx, a la Transformers, instead of paper folding sfx. Since there are two Es in the word “create”, I wanted the second e to really be a show-off.