Chances are a Bloomberg Businessweek cover has stopped you in your tracks at some point: Maybe it was the brilliant cat hurricane GIF, or airplanes humping mid-air, or the most anti-Apple typography ever slapped over Tim Cookâs face. But behind the provocative graphic design is a smart strategy thatâs changing the way publications are made, both online and off.
It didnât always used to be this way. Since the publicationâs relaunch in 2010, the creative team has been busy reshaping a stodgy magazine youâd only touch in your dentistâs waiting room into a dynamic, entertaining, and visually driven must-read. And theyâre killing it.
Editor Josh Tyrangiel sets the tone and the bar high and also contributes creative ideas himself, says Vargas. These âObama Crashedâ and âLetâs Get It Onâ airplane merger covers seen here were both ideas that originated with him, executed by former creative director Richard Turley
Todayâs success is largely thanks to creative director Robert Vargas and deputy creative director Tracy Ma, with a hefty nod to Richard Turley, the creative director who oversaw the relaunch and established the new visual language (he departed earlier this year for MTV). But the creatives also heap lots of the credit upon Bloomberg Businessweekâs editor Josh Tyrangiel. âWhen he rebooted the mag he created this environment where the visual people and the words people have equal footing and work side-by-side,â says Ma. âThatâs not the case anywhere else, I think, and itâs a model thatâs worked pretty well for us, and something we keep pushing for.â
The internet moves fast, but the pace of creating a weekly printed magazine is blistering. The designers only have a handful of days to build a thick publication with often visually challenging content. âThe primary job for every designer here is to be a problem solver, and we get excited when we feel like weâve nailed visualizing a story by approaching it from a completely fresh angle,â says Vargas.
As designers finish their layouts, theyâre posted on a wall and the staff is invited to a walk-through of the ideas daily, so the designers get input from everyone, not just other creatives. âGenerally, if people laugh, the idea works; if thereâs a lot of silence and confused faces, itâs the kiss of death, and we go back to the drawing board,â says Vargas. The issues ship each Wednesday and often the designers donât know the final design until that day.
Businessweek interactive designer Toph Tucker was recruited to pose as âTech Broâ for a cover story defending Silicon Valley. So it made perfect sense to have Tucker do the interview with Vargas about the coverâin character.
Thereâs also an entire other level of engagement, a glimpse at the creative process that Bloomberg Businessweek gives readers each week. Thereâs a âHow We Made Itâ feature about the cover art in every issue, and the creative team produces videos to talk about the designs as well.
âThe good ones are probably where we acknowledge that we struggled with something, or were unsure of an idea, and had many terrible iterations before we arrived at the final,â says Vargas. But it also gives readers a peek at the magazineâs personality, says Ma. âI think itâs a great way to let our readers in on the dialogue and to show that we actually have a lot of fun making the magazine every week.â
I asked Vargas and Ma to walk me through some of the more attention-getting (and controversial) covers and illustrations in recent months.
Thereâs one pretty smart way youâre bridging the print/digital divide: You turn the covers into GIFs for your online audience. When youâre brainstorming are you thinking about how the art will translate into a GIF eventually?
Vargas: Usually weâre not thinking about how covers will translate into a GIF in the early stages of brainstorming, because were so wrapped up in developing what the idea will be in the first place.
Our online art director Steph Davidson generally looks at covers as soon as their done and sees if thereâs something fun she can do with it.
This was the case with Obama âToo Cool for Crisis Managementââshe told me the idea she had, and about an hour later she showed it to me and I thought it was great.
When did the practice of animating the covers start?
Ma: I started animating the covers with the Snapchat disappearing cover GIF. The image of the fading pixels felt totally uncomfortable as a static thing and was just begging to be animated. Obama âToo Cool,â though, was an idea that worked very well as a clean static image, so the GIF was just a very hilarious extra. Right now we normally donât really think about how it will translate into a GIF, but maybe that process will change eventually.
I also want to point out that you did make one of the most amazing GIFs in recent memoryâof a cat-hurricane.
The cat-egory 5 superstorm created for a story about the Weather Channel swept the internet.
Ma: Claire Suddathâs story about the Weather Channelâs bizzare new business modelhad many different parts to it and it was a bit of a struggle trying to distill into something sharp. You start a project like this knowing that the visual execution has to be something quick and snappy and scrappy but getting there sometimes, like it did in this case, takes a lot of effort. So this was a nice exercise in âhow dumb and excellent can you make something?â
We tried to run it on the print cover, but it was just another one of those ideas that was conceived in my head as a moving image so in the end it existed most comfortably as that.
How did you decide to go so refreshingly-opposite-of-Iveâs-Apple for the Tim Cook cover design?
Vargas: This came about was pretty naturally, and started with the photo. We knew we didnât want to execute the photo in the style of traditional CEO portraiture, where we basically turn Tim into a heroic statue. We wanted to humanize him, show him as real person with a certain degree of warmth.
Once we made a photo select we started experimenting with type. When Tracy showed us what she came up with, with the curly, colorful type, we gravitated towards it because we thought the friendliness of it made sense with the tone we were going for. We honestly had no discussions about it beyond that.
Ma: Our goal was to portray Tim Cook as a warm and different kind of CEO using whatever tools we had at our disposal. We sent it to the printer because we were confident that weâd achieved that. Iâm still completely dumbfounded by the kind of reaction it got. It certainly made us laugh a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1JMn0_oxFY
The behind-the-cover conversation with Vargas and Tyrangiel discusses why Tim Cook needed such shiny happy design.
Designers really seemed to be freaking out about this.
Vargas: When we saw the reaction online, we were taken completely by surprise. Tracy and I sit next to each other, so the morning it went live we kept looking at comments online and turning to each other and cracking up. Someone mocked up a fake Bloomberg Businessweek Jony Ive cover that I thought was genius.
Ma: Most of all Iâm really glad that we managed to make a bunch of âtypographic-excellence oldsâ really angry without even trying. Itâs proof that weâre onto something new and exciting.
And speaking of that larger conversation, I think a lot of people thought the cover of Steve Ballmer was Photoshopped. You got him to pose!
Vargas: Steve deserves all the credit for being such a great model. He gave the photographer a lot of different options, and I spotted one that looked like an action shot. I added some blur lines and the headline on top and it was done. I was glad to have a week where the process was so easy.
Ma: I watched some beads-of-sweat After Effects tutorials and gave him some.
The sweat was just something you can get away with in the GIF version and would be too heavy-handed if we drew them in in the print cover.
With your Coke cover, I was so happy to see this extremely brazen attack on soda. But how did the advertising people react to this? Arenât they worried youâre going to scare off brands forever?
Vargas: What makes the magazine really interesting to me is that were not just going around congratulating corporations and businessmen on how successful they are. Were always looking critically at the subject matter were exploring. Coke was a good example of this. The story itself was not really negative, but it did go into the image problem theyâve acknowledged theyâre facing in a culture where sugar is so vilified. So to me the cover made complete sense and wasnât just a jab for the sake of being controversial. Iâm not sure what the repercussions were in the advertising department, but I think they probably expect this from us by now.
The âCoke Has a Fat Problemâ creative process was documented in the publication itself. In the end, a bloated bottle took the cover, while overweight Santa was moved inside the magazine.
Ma: I worked briefly on a Diet Coke ad segment at Leo Burnett a couple of years ago and it was such an awful, hallow experience. Iâm really fortunate to be working in editorial where youâre not using your skills to bullshit all the time. I think our main goal is to be an honest, trustworthy news magazine, so if weâre censoring ourselves in fear of scaring off advertisers then weâre not really successful at what we want to be. I think our advertising team understands that.
Whatâs the most underappreciated cover and why should we have paid more attention to it?
Vargas: I have a special place in my heart for the Tech Bro cover. We had so much fun nailing all the details, and I think our tech editor suggested including a Frenchie with GoPro strapped to itâs head. Weirdly, they actually make a GoPro dog strap now, so I think we at least deserve credit for that.
Ma: I do like my glowing corn phallus coverâŠ
Whatâs on deck for this week?
The cover from this weekâs issue and a spread that opens the back section of the magazine
Vargas: Itâs our annual âYear Aheadâ issue, which covers whatâs ahead in 2015 over a range of topics and industries. In terms of the design, weâve taken another risk by liberally illustrating just about every page of the magazine ourselves in a flat pastel-colored vector style.
An energy map summarizing the energy landscape in the U.S. for the âYear Aheadâ issue
Iâd like to reiterate here that weâre not really professional illustrators by trade. As always, I canât predict what kind of reaction itâll get, if any. But I can confidently say weâve never done an issue that looks like this before, and you wonât find another magazine out there that looks like it, so Iâm excited for people to have a look.
Update: Due to an editing error, the role of former creative director Richard Turley, who led the magazineâs relaunch, and can be credited with several covers including âThe Hedge Fund Mythâ at the top, was omitted. It has been added above.