The New Yorker cover created on an iPhone

The New Yorker Mag­a­zine has a tra­di­tion of excel­lent, chal­leng­ing and often times con­tro­ver­sial cov­ers for its weekly mag­a­zine. This was evi­dent dur­ing the pre­vi­ous Amer­i­can elec­tion, with two cov­ers illus­trat­ing the stereo­types of both can­di­dates (see here and here). The pro­pri­ety and taste­ful­ness of the cov­ers cre­ated some­thing of a polit­i­cal firestorm, or at least in media cir­cles. It gave the media a chance to feign indig­na­tion, point fin­gers, and flog one if their own, some­thing that seems to be great sport amongst the fifth estate. Of course, the Daily Show had the most ratio­nal and hilar­i­ous take on the con­tro­versy see here.

Polit­i­cally the New Yorker takes risks not only in con­tent, but also in style and tech­nique.  I admire the way their edi­tors and art direc­tors take chances and have cover illus­tra­tions not only by a wide assort­ment of artists using a stag­ger­ing assort­ment of medium; from oils or water­col­ors,  pen and ink, even the amaz­ing illus­tra­tions of Bob Staake cre­ated using the 3.0 ver­sion of Pho­to­shop (the lat­est ver­sion of the pro­gram is 11).  Now we can add the Apple iPhone to such august company.

The cur­rent issue fea­tures a cover cre­ated by illus­tra­tor and designer Jorge Colombo. It’s pretty amaz­ing, he drew the cover using Brushes, an appli­ca­tion for his iPhone. Accord­ing to the New Yorker he drew it while stand­ing for an hour out­side Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square. Which I find a delight­fully quirky and sur­real fac­toid for some rea­son.  Watch him cre­at­ing his cover below:

See­ing Colombo’s fan­tas­tic work being cre­ated on a sim­ple iPhone app and the work that Staake can do using only Pho­to­shop 3.0 is pretty amaz­ing. It should rein­force the point that com­put­ers and soft­ware mere are tools, pow­er­ful and great tools to be sure, but they exist only in ser­vice of some other pur­pose. In this case we should not  be blinded by the tech­nol­ogy and for­get the mean­ing of the art. Pho­to­shop, iPhones and their ilk are wildly dif­fer­ent that the prim­i­tive brushes of the Las­caux caves, but are sin­gu­lar in that they are means to an end, the cre­ation of art. I need to remind myself of this when I obses­sively pour over the lat­est tuto­ri­als on PSD Tuts or slob­ber over the newest bells and whis­tles in the next Adobe release. Pho­to­shop is a wicked tool, but still just a tool.

via Gabriel Cam­pa­nario / Urban Sketch­ers

If your inter­ested check out these related links:

• The New Yorker arti­cle on the cover read it here…
• iPhone Brushes Flickr Group, it is pretty amaz­ing. here…
• Jorge Colombo’s Web­site here…
• ABC News inter­views Jorge Colombo here…
• Bob Staake’s Web­site here…
• More Bob Staake illus­tra­tion tech­niques on YouTube here…
• Peruse the Cov­ers of The New Yorker Mag­a­zine for inspi­ra­tion. Search the archives here…

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