Beloved publishing house McSweeney’s is home to a litany of compelling endeavors, including a quarterly literature, arts, and culture magazine called The Believer. Since 2013, The Believer has shared journalism, essays, interviews, comics, and poetry with its readers while serving as a critical player in the mission to keep printed media thriving.
The Believer’s latest issue is the Music Issue, releasing on December 14. Its pages overflow with scintillating features, such as interviews with The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst, Pulitzer-winner Rhiannon Giddens, Jeremy Gaudet (Kiwi Jr) in conversation with Ryan H. Walsh, NBA player Victor Oladipo on his Afrobeats album, Mimi Lok on BTS, Nick Horby, and Carrie Brownstein. Additionally, The Believer will launch BLVR Radio with this issue, contributor-hosted DJ hours broadcasted on BFF.fm, with the DJs curating their playlists to complement the articles they wrote for the issue.
Before the Music Issue’s official release, PRINT was given an insider sneak peek at the magazine cover. Developed by The Believer Editor Daniel Gumbiner and Art Director Sunra Thompson and illustrated by Kristian Hammerstad, the cover is a fun and eye-catching encapsulation of the issue that stays true to the publication’s overall branding and aesthetic.
Below, Gumbiner and Thompson elaborate on the process of creating a magazine cover and the specific considerations that went into this particular design.
The magazine’s wager has always been that a beautiful print object, something that feels more like an art object than a commercial one, is unusual and compelling.
Sunra Thompson
What are the core tenets of making a compelling magazine cover?
ST: It’s nice when a cover has some degree of beauty— however you define that. We try to make covers as beautiful, inviting, approachable, and surprising as we can. I think the magazine’s wager has always been that a beautiful print object, something that feels more like an art object than a commercial one, is unusual and compelling. Weird is good, too.
Of course, the correct answer is that the core tenet of a compelling magazine cover is to be lucky enough to work with Kristian Hammerstad, who illustrated this cover (and all of our covers since our relaunch).
Distilling an entire magazine issue into a single graphic on its cover must be challenging. What’s your typical process like for ideating around a cover design?
DG: Generally, we have a standard template for our covers, which involve several portraits of people in the issue, or what we refer to as “the grid.” But we tend to do something more conceptual for a special issue like this one.
We started by thinking about what defined the issue, what defines the magazine, and what we wanted to convey through the cover. It involves conversations between the editors and designers. Then, our art director, Sunra Thompson, began refining the concept with the illustrator. We went through a few rounds on this cover, tweaking the expressions and positions of some of the figures in the car to achieve the look and feel we wanted.
What were the most important considerations that went into this particular cover design? What ideas were the most important to communicate through the cover?
DG: For this issue, we collaborated with BFF.fm, a fantastic community radio station in San Francisco’s Mission District, to produce 16 original radio shows related to the issue. Hosted by the issue’s contributors, these shows dive more deeply into the music explored in the print issue. So we wanted the cover to pay homage to radio in some way—hence, everyone packed in a car together, listening to the radio.
But we also very much think of The Believer as a community of artists—a magazine made by a collective. And the cover conveys this too: it suggests that inside, you’ll find a wide variety of perspectives, a raucous assortment of voices, a party of sorts. So, this is something we liked about the concept, too.