Bloomberg Businessweek parodies well-known magazines for satirical newsstand cover shot

For its fourth annual The Year Ahead issue, Bloomberg Businessweek has created a satirical newsstand full of parody versions of well-known magazines. In a collective send-up of _Time, The Economist, Financial Times, In Style, Wired and even muscle magazines, the cover image required the magazine’s art team to effectively design not just one cover, but seven fake covers.

According to creative director Rob Vargas, the idea for the cover shot came from the fact that this issue, rather than having one theme such as the Election issue or Design issue, is a collection of all the topics covered in the magazine’s news section, from economics and technology to retail.

“It’s the one special issue a year that doesn’t have a sole theme,” Rob tells It’s Nice That. “Rather than try and package all those topics in a way that feels cohesive, we wanted to make it seem like we bundled seven different magazines together. We decided to execute very, very bad facsimiles of existing publications that cover each topic, simply because we though it would be funny.

“We had to get more creative with sections like energy, which we made look like an exercise magazine. For the overall art direction we borrowed very heavily from our reference material. We generally like to play with the idea of clichés a lot, so we combined exaggerated versions of other publication clichés with our own.”

The issue is the magazine’s fourth annual guide to the companies, economies, products and innovators that will matter in the coming year, including 50 companies to watch.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s The Year Ahead issue hits real-life newsstands on Friday 21 October.