This cover is great! What a statement it would have made to actually print it in this day and age, when your average Fortune cover (do an image search to see some) looks no different from low-end fashion magazines (besides the subject matter obviously). They all look the same, and they’re all boring. No one really cares about looking at the unattractive rich people who are photographed for the cover… why that’s a better idea than great illustrations like this, I really can’t understand.

There are some magazines that still have great covers, The New Yorker being the obvious example. The Economist is often pretty decent as well, at least compared to others. Even National Geographic, though, has not had particularly good covers in recent years.

Almost every other mainstream magazine looks exactly the same as everything else on the newsstand, and it’s not like it’s a good design… it’s boring and cluttered (you know, generically photographed famous person with haphazardly placed article titles on top).

Interestingly, some magazines have different covers for the newsstands and for subscribers… the one subscribers get is less cluttered and more attractive. Obviously they’ve done some research to determine what works on the newsstand… but I’m not convinced they really got it right.

To me, it looks like there may have been other reasons why this cover was rejected. I’ve had to look at this cover three different ways to be able to read all the tiny gags. From what would be a normal viewing distance of a magazine on a rack, it doesn’t read at all. In fact, it looks pretty bad with funky perspective and three or four straight out of the tube colors. In order to appreciate it, you have to blow it up on your screen. I’ve seen problems with scale on a lot of current illustration. What you see in Photoshop isn’t exactly what you get when it’s printed on an 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper.

The “bird’s eye view” cover with lots of little details to discover goes back to the 20s, but usually it is better composed for looking at from a distance.

But it’s the theme that I suspect didn’t sit well. I can imagine the rejection meeting: “We asked you to make a cover celebrating the 500 most successful people in the nation and you drew something that insults and blames them for every possible ill… and you expect to be paid?”

If Fortune isn’t interested, why not some other magazine like Mother Jones?

Like most of the “jokes” here, it just comes over as snide and moralistic and not at all funny.

There’s your something.