The Art of the Cover

By Paul Tarricone

I like magazine covers. Every so often, I will copy a cover from The Week, TIME, Sports Illustrated, even the AAA magazine and forward it to the LD+A team for inspiration. The one thing magazines offer over digital media is the opportunity to make a statement with a cover—whether you are publishing that magazine in print or online. That’s a benefit to the reader. And the cover-selection process is fun for the editorial team as well.

So how is an LD+A cover born? To explain that, I like to start at the end. Think of it this way: as a monthly periodical, we get 12 turns at bat. The question becomes, how to use those 12 opportunities. Some months the choice is obvious: The IES Illumination Awards, for example, appear on the cover in August to coincide with the announcement of each year’s IA recipients. In other months, a project’s architectural lighting is so spectacular that there is no debate. But as a magazine covering the lighting profession—not just lighting projects—there are months when a pretty picture won’t do. For instance, theme issues on “light and health” and “connected lighting” are often better served through a concept illustration than a photo. (October’s COVID-themed cover attempted to do just that.)

Likewise, this issue on “lighting history” also cried out for a concept. On the pages within, we bring you stories on how lighting design helped revive a city hall building turned marketplace, a dilapidated urban park, a pedestrian bridge that would make its trailblazing namesakes proud and a 19th century campus building restyled into an events/exhibit space. Each project is a work of art. But rather than choose one for the cover, we opted to salute them all through an illustration depicting a designer “Remaking History” using the light sources on his palette. We hope it does them justice.