Covers 44 issues
My favourite covers
Covers I made as editor. Pick a magazine.
PC PowerPlay
Making PC PowerPlay covers was always a unique challenge. During both my stints as editor, the mag was sold with a CD glued (with weird rubbery glue) in the bottom left corner. This CD had a cover of its own, explaining all the demos and free software that was on it. Many readers purchased for the CD only, in days of 56Kbps dial up internet and early ADSL – getting a 50MB demo saved them hours of online time.
Later the mag included a DVD edition as well as CD. We ran both for a while, as readers upgraded from CD-ROM to DVD-ROM. This meant making two subtly different covers, plus a CD case cover and a DVD case cover. So much plastic!
You can therefore see in some of the covers an odd “blank space” in the bottom left. This is on the earlier mags. Toward the end of my second editorship, the mag was shipped in a plastic bag (sorry Earth) with a loose cardboard DVD sleeve. The upside was the cover could now use more centralised designs, and the potential purchaser could slide the loose DVD around to see the extra bits. We also did SUBSCRIBER covers, because those always shipped in a bag with an unglued disc. It was mad really. And mostly my fault: I was the editor who pitched to then-owner Phil Keir that we should upgrade from CD to DVD since the demos were getting so big they wouldn’t fit on a single 700MB CD anymore.
Truly it was a different time. The covers below are a mix of my favourites, and significant issues.
Popular Science
Like with PCPP I was very passionate and hands on with the art director when it came to cover design. This worked well with some ADs... less well with others. But every cover was heavily scrutinised to meet the exacting demands of the Australian newsagent (and for a while, supermarket) scene. These mags were about delivering a month’s worth of reading, first before the mainstream internet, and then after in competition with it.
These PopSci covers were the Australian versions because the US covers were often not really what the Aussie market responded to. 2 Park Ave used to go for the big expensive commissioned hero image and sparse text. Aussies wanted to know there were at least five things in the mag they wanted to read. Thus our covers.
PopSci had a few international editions, and as far as I know, I was the only editor who insisted we made our own covers targeted to our market. It worked too.
These are my favourite Aussie PopSci covers from the mag’s golden age 2014-2015. Some of these re-used the US art but most are uniquely Australian.
