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1,000 covers and counting: Creative Director D.W. Pine on 27 years making TIME's covers

Hello magazine makers,

This week I interviewed D.W. Pine, Creative Director for TIME Magazine.

I spoke to him as part of an interview round to highlight D.W.’s 1,000th TIME cover and it was a joy. Mad skills aside, it’s just so uplifting to speak to someone who absolutely adores their job.

The audio from our conversation follows and after that an edit of the transcript in case you would rather read than listen.

Slàinte Mhath

Peter

Peter Houston: 1,000 covers?

D.W. Pine: Yeah, it's crazy to think I started in 1998 and at that time all we really did was the printed magazine. Of course, we've pivoted into so many different platforms.

I like to think about the legacy that's been built over 100 years of TIME, being spread across all these platforms with the same kind of journalistic trust and integrity that was instilled way back in the day.

It's exciting to say that we can still tell the stories we used to just put on the cover and parlay those into events, documentaries - you name it. It's kind of anything that comes our way.

PH: It’s also wild to think you've been with TIME for 27 years, but that’s still not even a third of the magazine’s history.

DW: No doubt. I'm on the shoulders of everyone before me.

It's a huge benefit to be able to have the red border. I get to figure out what goes in that blank space. That red border has an amazing history that equals integrity and trust. It's a daunting task every time we figure out what goes in it.

But we work with the world's best artists and photographers. Our team looks over every single pixel that goes into the cover to make sure we're making the most impactful message as clear and impactful as we can.

PH: I think I read somewhere that you love the constraint of the red border.

DW: Yeah. I'm going to use a Baskin Robbins scenario. If I go in, there's just too many flavours. I know I want mint chocolate chip, so why not just get that? I look at the border the same way.

I can't bust out of that frame. I limit myself with typography and colour within that red border. Over the years, that's helped me focus more on what we want to say and how we want to say it visually, rather than getting caught up in all the little design details.

We're all inundated with billions of images daily. We carry them in our pockets. So how does a TIME cover break through? It comes down to visual simplicity.

I spend most of my time figuring out what not to put on the cover. I’ve got three seconds of your time when it comes to a digital audience. I have to grab you and say, ‘Hey, this is what I want you to see.’

PH: Is there a formula for that?

DW: Fortunately, we have a lot of smart people helping me figure this out. It’s a collaborative journalistic approach. We constantly try things - add this, take away that. Like a little chef, ‘let’s add this spice and this spice’. Then you’ve gone too far and you pull it back. Every week, it’s a whole new process.

I love having something curated for me. There are so many things that are just thrown at us. There's a finality to a book, a magazine, a podcast, something with a period at the end. I look at the cover that way too, really curate that thing down into a product that people appreciate.

PH: What’s your starting point?

DW: That blank canvas, which is scary as all get out.

We have a lot of meetings with writers and editors to say ‘how do you want to approach this?’ and figure out the best focus.

One thing I’ve always loved about TIME is our authority to cover world news, health, climate, tech, anything. I take the same kind of approach when it comes to the cover visually. It can be thousands of drones in the sky, a black and white portrait, an illustration in any number of forms. There's a beauty in that.

My job is to showcase great artists and photographers and bring those voices to our process. Hand the canvas over to them.

Ideas pop up all the time. It's certainly not gonna happen if you say, ‘Oh, let's go have a brainstorming meeting’. It comes from walking down the street, taking a shower, late at night, when you’re least expecting it.

PH: Do you ever see a story and hope it becomes a cover story?

DW: I’ve had moments in the past where I was like, ‘Oh, come on, let’s do that’.

I remember, when we closed the magazine on a Wednesday, and it was a Sunday night and the Mars Rover had just landed for the first time.

I thought it was spectacular, but we only had a couple of days and the Mars Rover certainly wasn't going to be able to bring us back any photos in time for our close. I reached out to a 3D artist to create a model of the Rover and we worked with NASA to get the actual landscape the Rover was sitting on.

It was before Wall-E came out, but it was like that Wall-E approach, where this is what this little guy’s looking at right now.

Another one was the Meltdown cover that we did of Trump.

One of our Washington reporters said in a phone call, ‘I think the campaign is having a meltdown’. To me, that's a visual that I can run with.

I’d worked with Edel Rodriguez - the artist who created it - lots of times. I said, ‘I know the work you've done, why don't we apply this meltdown concept to that?’ In the end, he created an entirely new visual language for the first term of the presidency.

PH: Love those covers. You've seen enormous media disruption - web, iPad, phone. How has that changed your job?

DW: We are in a constant form of reinvention. To survive nowadays, you just continually have to try new things. We're always trying new ways to tell stories, whether it’s through our phone or when the iPad was supposed to be the saviour of the publishing industry, NFTs or AI.

We still do all those things and we have been able to generate an audience with those through the years so we keep them going. The platform just happens to be different.

PH: You can do things now you never could, like animated covers. Does that make it easier, harder, just different?

DW: Probably just different. [Moving covers] have generated an entirely new audience for us. Someone who might not have ever really thought about TIME, because it was in the grocery store or in the bookstore, they are on their Instagram feeds or Twitter or TikTok and they're seeing a moving TIME cover.

That’s a cool thing, but again, just a different way of storytelling.

PH: Talking about different audiences, there was a huge response to your Taylor Swift Person of the Year issue.

DW: Yeah. It's always wonderful to see an entirely new audience.

TIME’s Person of the Year been around since 1928 and it's always our most attention-getting issue. Choosing Taylor Swift, two years ago, just increased that 10 times given the worldwide popularity of her concert tour.

Throughout the year we do quite a few multiple covers on different people, but that was the first time we had done multiple covers on the same person.

When the images we got of Taylor Swift came in, each one kind of represented a different aspect of her life. She was doing a similar thing with her tour so we felt compelled to offer our readers the same kind of variety that she did during her concerts.

PH: That’s great commercially, but again, did it make your job harder?

DW: A cover does so many different things, it certainly helps to illustrate a story or bring light to a story, but it can also stand on its own at times.

We just did a cover with Elon Musk behind the Resolute Desk which generated a lot of attention. We weren't the first people to say that Elon Musk has a lot of power in the Oval Office. We certainly weren't writing the most words about that either… We didn't even put any words on that cover.

But by putting those two together, the power of the Resolute desk and Musk behind it, that just furthered that point. It stood on its own, as its own thing.

PH: Have you ever had an editor say, no, we can't do that?

DW: All the time. I’m in a very fortunate position. Every editor I've worked with, and I've now worked with six managing editors, they think I have the fun job and I do.

I can play in my little sandbox of visuals, they all like to play in that world too, because that is the fun stuff. The harder stuff is what they have to do, explaining why you are putting so-and-so on the cover? Why are you going down this path? Why is the story slanted this way?

I start off trying to create a lot of risks to break through. Besides the simplicity aspect, you really want to create memorable moments.

PH: Are you allowed to say what's your favorite TIME cover?

DW: Oh, I'm certainly allowed to say. What's hard to say is that they're all little babies, they all have their own little stories to tell and it's very hard to pick out a certain one.

Instead of favourites, I might say proud moments.

We did a cover a while back on a girl named Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan woman who had her nose cut off by the Taliban. It's incredibly difficult to look at. It makes you just want to turn away and you can imagine the care that went into deciding to publish that.

I was proud of the fact that the managing editor, Rick Stengel at the time, decided to publish that, this difficult cover to look at but an important thing for us to be doing.

PH: What question do you never get asked that you wish someone would ask?

DW: That! That specific question.

I talked about it a little bit, but ideas and where they come from.

It took me a while to understand that I can leave the process for a little while. We used to have our offices in Midtown (New York) and I would walk outside to Central Park and walk around the lake there. At the time I was like, ‘I don't have 15 or 20 minutes to spend doing this. What am I doing?’, but everyone needs those moments.

You really have to just sit back sometimes and contemplate. I'm not into meditation, but I'm certainly into clearing my head.

As I said, ideas come from all over the place. I’ve always had to trust that they will come and they do. That’s been a comforting thing over my career, just reminding myself that they do.

PH: We were told print would be dead by now. It’s not. What do you think's going on?

DW: I have a book. It says ‘Print is dead’. It's 20 years old.

The end of print has been around, probably, even before I got into this industry. I don't know why that is. We certainly consider it very important for us to print our product.

When we were studying about the iPad, we did a lot of stuff about the dopamine effect. I still get dopamine from opening a book. I still think a lot of people are that way.

The beauty is we can do both and try to succeed in both areas.

They're two distinct audiences for us. One sits back on the couch on a Sunday with a cup of coffee and really dives into some reported stories. The other is like, ‘Ooh, this happened today. I wanna know what TIME thinks’.

Read more about D.W. Pine and how he does what he does…

• The Man Behind 1,000 TIME Covers
  TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacob’s on D.W.’s stellar cover-making career.

• D.W. Pine on being in charge of the most important real estate in journalism

  FIPP’s Pierre De Villiers interviewing D.W about how he does what he does.

• How TIME’s collectible covers make the case for a print comeback
  Kayleigh Barber at Digiday on the success of those Taylor Swift covers.

More good reads from the week: