I love doing my thing on the Web, but I’d be a liar if I told you there weren’t things I missed about being a magazine journalist. And one of the top three things I pine for is the fun (and challenge) of creating a cover every month. So I love, love, love this video which shows how my pals at Macworld put together the cover of their new issue. And as much hard work as it shows, it doesn’t capture everything involved in doing a cover, since it focuses on the photography and layout aspect of a process that also involves story ideas and wordsmithing, and sometimes multiple, significantly different mockups of different ideas.

Here’s Macworld’s story about the video.

(Side note: I may have implied that I don’t do magazine stuff anymore, but I lied–in fact, this very Macworld has a piece I wrote, on the war between Macs and Windows and why it doesn’t make anybody happier or healthier. It’s the first article I’ve written for the magazine after more than twenty years of reading it…and eventually sitting next to the people who make it.)

(Additional side note: If we’d been clever enough to do time-lapse photography of the complete PC World cover process when I was there, we’d have been required to include footage of me sweating for several weeks as I waited for newsstand sales reports to come in and tell us whether we had a hit or a flop on our hands.)

 
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