All hail the snarky, all text cover!

Back when I was designing covers for an entertainment insert at the school paper to pay for college, an all text cover usually meant that the original cover idea fell through, either through a late photo/illustration, or we couldn’t come up with anything tasteful enough to actually work without us getting banned or excommunicated (from the public state school, *cough*…)

More often than not, the all-text cover is usually the Hail-Mary of cover designs*. They’re usually quick, safe, and really hard to screw up, especially with a good writer on board.

This beauty that showed up in my mailbox today, though, made me smile like nothing else. No, it’s not particularly well designed. Yes, it has that heinous orange that Wired Magazine is so fond of. Yes, it probably took the designer 20 minutes to lay it out once the copy was in.

But you know what? It’s the funniest cover they’ve done in over a year. If a flaky illustrator is the reason this beauty came to being at the 11th hour, then they should do it more often.

* Not that there aren’t good examples of all-text cover designs, mind you. An easy recent example of excellent, well though out text cover design is the cover to John Hodgeman’s The Areas of My Expertise.