Covers
11.13.09
The 10 Greatest Steve Jobs Magazine Covers of All Time
CO-WRITTEN WITH SAM KUO
Last week Fortune magazine picked Apple's Steve Jobs as the CEO of the decade, and ran this cool cover (design director: John Korpics; photograph by Albert Watson). Jobs has been the go-to tech dude for business mags and newsweeklies for over 20 years, and it got us thinking about all the covers that he has appeared on. Fortunately, art director Sam Kuo over at Kuo Design has created the Steve Jobs on Magazine Covers page, a compilation of 85 covers from 1981-2009. In collaboration with Sam, we have created this list of The 10 Greatest Steve Jobs Magazine Covers of All Time. Feast your eyes on these beauties, and then head over to Kuo's page for the full, obsessive Steve Jobs experience.
October 1981. This is the first major business magazine cover to feature Jobs.
February 15, 1982. Art director: Rudolph Hoglund; illustrator: Alan Magee. From the very beginning, Jobs was controlling about his photographic imagery. He usually insisted on posing with his latest product (for one Fortune cover he held up cardboard cutouts of the Spotlight and Dashboard Mac icons). For that reason, many of the best covers of him are illustrations.
1984. This is the debut issue of Macworld. Apple's "Remarkable New Personal Computer" looks pretty clunky now, especially the mouse.
February 1996. Creative director: John Plunkett; design director: Thomas Schneider; photograph: Steve Double.
Sam Kuo on his obsession with Jobs: "As a designer, I find his understanding and caring about design, coupled with engineering and functionality, fascinating. As for the rest of it, his life story is compelling: his rise to fame by starting Apple with Steve Wozniak, then being fired from it, leaving him out in the wilderness; and his chance return to Apple about a decade later; then turning Apple, which was a few months away from bankruptcy, into the $127 billion company we all know today."
November 9, 1998. Art director: Margery Peters. This is Sam Kuo's favorite Steve Jobs cover.
October 2007. Steve Jobs gets his back massaged by Bill Gates on the cover of this Japanese Mac magazine. What's with the monkey in the hot tub? Let us know if you can translate the cover type for us.
FFebruary 6, 2006. Art director: Malcolm Frouman; illustrator: Robert Risko. Jobs sells Pixar to Disney.
June 25, 2007. Design director: Chris Dixon; illustration: Sean McCabe.
December 2007-January 2008. Design director: Dean Markadakis; illustration: Alex Ostroy.
Spanish edition of Esquire, 2008.
For a complete look at every Steve Jobs magazine cover published (85 and counting), visit Sam Kuo's Steve Jobs on Magazine Covers website.
Sam Kuo has designed annual reports, corporate magazines, brochures, and newsletters, as well as the Society of Publication Design annuals #22, #23, and #24. He's now working on book covers and many other projects.
Special thanks to Andrew Horton at BusinessWeek, Linda Rubes at Fortune, and Dean Markadakis at Fast Company for their help in compiling this list.
Fantastic post. The associated package on Jobs in the new issue of FORTUNE is a great telling of the Jobs story. Dig the not to the old Apple colors.
Running out to get that Fortune issue today! I'm loving that Apple rainbow color palette too. I'd have to agree, out of the entire Kuo collection, these 10 may just be my faves as well. Yes, go to the Kuo Design site -- very cool to see those 87 variations and themes over the years...magazines getting redesigned; Steve Jobs getting redesigned.
Have a look at this amazing (and forgotten) Steve Jobs cover when he was almost bankrupt in 1994.
Not only he did he save Apple from collapse but his personal comeback is unbelievable.
http://futureofmagazine.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/the-best-steve-jobs-cover/
Great collection of covers. Here's a translation of the headlines on the Japanese cover:
The big headline across the page is:
インテルMac時代のMacとウィンドウズの賢い共有共存
Interu-Mac jidai no Mac to Uindouzu no kashikoi kyouyuu kyouzon
"Mac & Windows Smart Sharing and Co-Existence in the Intel Mac Era"
The subhead in vertical red type is:
拡張子やフォント、ファイルの扱いはここに注意！
Kakuchoushi ya fonto, fairu no atsukai wa koko ni chuui!
"Watch out for extensions, fonts, and file handling!"
The big character on the purple curtains says "Men". Can't explain the monkey, except they're common at mountain hot spring resorts in some parts of Japan.
Drew
GREAT post! I suspect I am the only human being who has the Oct. 1988 Newsweek magazine with Steven Jobs signature on the front and his added comment "I LOVE manufacturing" that he signed for me at Lotus Development in Cambridge MA. It is my pride and joy. Will be happy to share a scanned version if you're interested in seeing it! just email me dcallan3@nc.rr.com. Enjoy.