Cover Story
How we chose this week’s cover image
A behind-the-scenes look at our design process
Our end-of-year double issue is a celebration of our best journalism. We cover the news, of course, but we also set aside around half the issue for features that this year range from the story of a great and vanished African civilisation to the delights of corrugated iron, from NASA’s quest to find funnier, kinder astronauts to the mathematical formula that could save democracy.
In that spirit, we also break our rule that the cover is always coupled with the week’s main editorial. It is a chance for our cover designer to indulge us with a flight of fancy and a little bit of visual theatre. This year he has given us three covers in one.
As you can see, each of our regions—Asia, the Americas, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa—has a train steaming across a different landscape. Put them together and you have a triptych that sets a Singaporean kampong against St Andrew’s Church in Kyiv and the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. If you look carefully, you can spot Julius Caesar and a dodo, as well as a soya plant and a letterbox—all of which hint at the delights within.
This is the story of our three-in-one cover.
The idea came from “Murder of the Orient Express”, an elegy to the severed railway lines that once connected the Middle East. When we were thinking about how to illustrate it, we looked back to travel posters from the 1920s and ’30s. The pandemic has kept the world cooped up. Staycations and visits to the nearest tourist trap are fine and good, but don’t you long to stand in front of an international departure board and savour the promise of sun, sea and snow? It struck us that our cover could be a train journey transporting readers across the world.
Here is an early sketch. The elements are all there, but it is very busy. And the train has been plonked down in front of the three vistas. It just about works in the left-hand panel, set against the people wandering around the kampong. But by the time we reach the diners eating al fresco in front of Great Zimbabwe, the commuter line has turned into a model railway.
The answer was to give ourselves the freedom to work on different scales in each panel. The Visit Palestine poster pointed the way, with a few strategically placed trees framing each of the scenes.
This is our first shot at putting it all together. It was coming along well. The panels each work alone, but they are united by the foreground framing of trees and foliage; by the colours, applied in bold patches as if they were screen-printed; and by the three trains chuffing contentedly across the landscape.
Our next task was to work in references to some of the other features—Easter eggs at Christmas, if you will. The pepper pots, standing next to a discarded mask allude to our piece on the economic origins of the restaurant. The birdman represents a feature on how humans long to fly and sing like birds and to see with the eyes of a hawk.
St Andrew’s in Kyiv stands for an essay on why Vladimir Putin and his compatriots cannot tolerate the idea of a free and independent Ukraine. The black cat is about bringing up children in Hong Kong, which some parents have started to fear will mean teaching them to submit to the Chinese Communist Party.
The last thing we needed to settle was our headline. In Europe, where the end-of-year holiday is a family do, like Thanksgiving, we have always published a Christmas Double Issue. Likewise in Asia, where for many people Christmas is so obviously an import, like Black Friday, that it’s just good fun. But America, alas, has a War on Christmas and for the past decade or so we have not wanted to be part of the fight. Our edition there is a Holiday Double Issue. Would we stick or swap?
We stuck. No Yuletide hobgoblin demanded consistency. If our double-issue features share one thing, it is their enjoyment of the world in all its glorious variety. Happy reading. ■