The year 2015 marks our 10th anniversary and we chose to dedicate this issue to our celebrated cover art/articles. When we decided to launch Our Weekly in January 2005, our plan to create a quality African American newspaper with cutting-edge cover stories which spoke to our history, our present, and our future, was one of the many things we would do to differentiate our publication. In the same vein, we believed that such content demanded visual excellence and accordingly, our cover art became our signature in the marketplace. Our intent in 2005, and presently, is to create cover concepts that are intriguing, provocative, and informative while graphically beautiful.
We wanted our readers to be pulled in initially by the cover art, which would be the first, so to speak, “telling of the story.” We then strived to deliver excellence in the content which follows the cover art. We have experienced a great measure of success as the Our Weekly cover art/articles have celebrity status with our readers, many of whom regularly inquire about the backstory of our covers, give it coffee table status, or frame copies. We closely guard what/who will be on our covers so when we are questioned about “What is on the cover for next week?” you will find that we are most elusive. In fact, during our first two years, our covers were on a “need-to-know” basis. Employees often were not aware of the cover art until it published.
Our covers have made our readers think, laugh, share and take action. The Smithsonian Institute republished our cover art dated July 28, 2011, “Modifying Mankind,” which you will find on page 9 of this issue. The time consumed designing cover illustrations has been a mixed bag. For instance, the cover art on September 15, 2005, (page 3 of this issue) “Katrina, They may as well have asked monkeys for help” was conceived in five minutes. Others have taken several days and often contained several layers of artistic content, such as when we build something graphically unique in house or use original art from one of our celebrated artists, such as Charles Bibbs or Synthia Saint James. We even have the occasional in-house bickering about how to visually create our covers.
Enjoy this week’s issue of OW and celebrate our 10th Anniversary with our most compelling covers per year 2005 forward. Happy New Year.
Natalie Cole and David Miller
Follow the link below to see our best covers over our 10 years in business:
http://ourweekly.com/photos/galleries/2015/jan/08/10-year-anniversary/
