Photography: A behind-the-scenes look at the new Printed Pages cover process

If you’re a regular reader of the site you’re probably pretty familiar with the above image by now. It’s a cheeky little photo of an orange and a white hen’s egg engaged in a tender embrace. It was shot for us by Italian photographer Maurizio Di Iorio, a creative we’d not had the pleasure of working with before. We’ve known his work for a long time though and have always been enamoured with his still life imagery – although he’s equally adept at capturing the female form with similarly striking results – and decided he was the man we needed to take on the challenge of our first ever photographic front cover.

In the interest of transparency, and to reveal a little bit of our process, we thought we’d show you how we got to the final image. It’s always easy when you’re happy with the end result to forget that it took lots of time, energy and conversation to reach it, but we went down a whole lot of different routes in early stages of this new cover. There were flowers, strawberries and brightly-coloured rubber gloves; we had purples and pinks and a really jarring red. And there was that weird potato too (which I’m still pretty fond of). Anyway, here they are in chronological order for your enjoyment. Maybe next time we’ll stick a potato on the cover.

Printed Pages Spring 2014 is available to buy now!