Inside the design process at Bloomberg Businessweek

Adam Clark Estes of The Atlantic talked to Bloomberg Businessweek creative director Richard Turley about how the magazine’s cover is designed each week.

Here is an excerpt:

Let’s be honest. Bloomberg Businessweek‘s gotten suprisingly edgy lately. What’s up with that?

It’s funny because I don’t think we are. Everyone takes covers, interprets covers in a slightly different way. When you’re privy to the process, it demystifies it a bit. When you’re part of the process it loses the surprise value. So, I don’t see this one as particularly surprising. I think it’s fun. But, yah, it’s nice that everyone thinks that.

Tell us more about that process.

Generally speaking it’s just me and Josh Tyrangiel, the editor. We’re generally very informal. I don’t know if you know the geography of the office but we sit literally opposite each other and that enables us to talk and not to have meetings. The cover conversations happen quite quickly. Sometimes that’s a product of our proximity. Sometimes we just email a bit and say something and come up with an idea. Josh comes up with a lot of the cover ideas. It was Josh who said, “How about planes having sex for the cover?” And I was like “YES.” Sometimes I get a bit too much of the credit. We have a good relationship. We have a good partnership. We disagree occasionally. But we know when we have a good idea and don’t try to get in the way of it.

How much was Josh involved in the redesign process a couple of years ago?

He was there from day one. Norm Pearlstine recruited Josh and me. I think Josh started two or three weeks before me. It was from Josh’s original sketch. Josh wrote quite the detailed essay to get the job here when he was applying — what the magazine was, what we should be doing, and what the magazine should be. I took on the magazine’s redesign very much on the back of that. From the orignal brief it evolved and changed. He was completely instrumental. He was there all the time. It would’ve been this time of year two years ago that I came to Bloomberg in New York for the first time.

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