Creative Review selects the best magazine covers of the year – 2021
Creative Review look back at ten of their favourties, which we’d have to agree with.
As one of the most powerful tools at an editors disposal: the magazine cover, the most impactful this past year were unquestionably the ones which forced us to view the big issues of our time in a different way.
After a year of remote working, FT Weekend’s first issue of 2021 took an in-depth look at the office through the lens of great imagemaking. Shot in her childhood home using a projector, The cover features a photograph taken from American artist and educator Endia Beal’s series Performance Review.
Time magazines powerful image by Illustrator Tim O’Brien elegantly examines the mess that new President Joe Biden inherited from his predecessor; feating a pensive Biden looking out of a trashed Oval Office window.
Of course Its not often a Rihanna cover feature goes unoticed, but the team at Vogue Italia took things one step further when they invited her take the role of stylist, muse, director and photographer for its Do It Yourself issue.
Following the sad news that the Guardian Weekend supplement was folding this year, the publication’s design team was tasked with creating the new, larger-scale Saturday magazine. The launch issue featured three alternative covers, but the standout cover star was undoubtedly Greta Thunberg. Dropping ahead of the landmark COP26 conference on climate change, the cover image by Jeremy Strong saw the climate activist transformed into a human oil spillage, as an unidentifiable treacly black substance dripped from her hair, down her face and on to her neck and shoulders.
“Everyones wearing their slice of the city…” New York, New Yawk Style Issue
New York magazine temporarily switched its logo to ‘New Yawk’. The inspiration coming from photographer Bobby Docherty’s vivid cover image of a model dressed in a collection of NYC’s finest branded souvenirs to accompany a piece about the latest fashion trend in the city – New York itself.
