Tracie Louck is art director of The Stranger, which describes itself as “Seattle’s Only Newspaper.” Formerly published weekly, in late September The Stranger shifted to a biweekly schedule. Louck has been at The Stranger since June 2016; she previously was art director of another altweekly, Dallas Observer. The Stranger has a long history of graphic […]
[The publication of the last print edition of The Village Voice in September 2017 prompted this nostalgic look back at my experience working at the legendary weekly New York City newspaper. I served three stints at The Voice—as associate art director, 1986-88, art director, 1990, and design director, 1991-94. On August 31 the current Voice […]
Over the past year, creative director Andrew Horton has been directing the visual rebirth of The Village Voice, New York City’s dynamic (and legendary) altweekly newspaper. In addition to giving the insides a complete makeover, Horton brought in a brilliant and eclectic batch of illustrators who continued and expanded the paper’s graphic legacy. Under Horton’s […]
Andrew J. Nilsen has been the art director at altweekly SF Weekly for the past three years. During that time he’s art directed over 150 covers, many of them self-illustrated (and one, featuring an illustration by Brian Stauffer won a gold medal from SPD in Pub46). Early this year Andrew found himself jobless after a […]
Weekly magazines get a lot of love and attention for their covers, and deservedly so. Time, Bloomberg Businessweek, New York, The New York Times Magazine, until recently, Newsweek, and even the Huffington. app have all been producing a highly sophisticated and oftentimes cutting-edge approach to cover design. Meanwhile, a little under the radar, art director […]
Illustrator Brian Stauffer has been on a tear the past couple years, creating a brilliant body of work for publications as diverse as Worth, The New Yorker, the Huffington app, and countless altweeklies, as well as doing some knockout posters along the way. His cover illustrations for altweeklies from Kansas City to San Francisco have […]
One of my favorite altweekly newspapers is Dig Boston, formerly called (until last year) the Weekly Dig. Creative director Tak Toyoshima‘s covers are a weekly visual treat using a brilliant selection of illustrators and photographers, and sometimes handling the art chores himself. Dig Boston/Weekly Dig covers are artful, smart, provocative, and funny (and sometimes very […]
When Sarah Palin came to Boston in the spring of 2010, the city’s alternative newspaper Weekly Dig sponsored a reader contest to create the best cover image. The winner pictured two elephants, the symbol of Palin’s Republican Party, having sex. After the killing of Osama bin Laden last year, Seattle’s The Stranger printed a cover […]
2011 was another great year for alternative newsweekly cover design. Papers big and small across the country put out a steady stream of covers that were by turns graphic, provocative, funny, and highly original. With the rise of publication cover sites like Coverjunkie and NASCAPAS (and SPD Grids!) these local and regional covers are now […]
