Designing the daily Dose

The Torontoist blog carries an interesting retrospective on the art of the 270 covers of the late daily magazine Dose. As you'll recall, CanWest MediaWorks killed the project after one year of publication.

Former editor-in-chief Pema Hegan submitted to a q & a with Marc Lostracco about the creative process behind Dose's designs. Seen all together, the covers are much more impressive than they seemed to be at the time.

Hegan said that the process for picking a cover was deceptively simple:

We would come up with a few ideas in the morning news meeting and at noon, the editors and art department would huddle up to answer three questions:

1. What are people talking about or could they be talking about today?
2. What one simple idea do we want to communicate about this subject?
3. How can we visually express this idea in the most simple, powerful way?

Sometimes the meetings were a fun fifteen minutes and sometimes they were a difficult hour. After the meeting, the designers, editors, photographers and illustrators had seven hours to execute the idea and create the cover. I was constantly amazed by what a great job they did in such a short time.