The Man Behind 1,000 TIME Covers

Across all that change, one thing has not: week after week, D.W. has overseen the creation of our cover. Today, we publish the 1,000th cover created by D.W., who first joined TIME in 1998 from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Longevity itself is worth celebrating, and while D.W.’s output alone makes him one of this century’s most influential people in media, it is how he has gone about his work that we want to celebrate.

D.W. will tell you that creativity comes from working within limits. Over the decades, the cover has developed a few consistent guidelines: The printed cover size is 8 by 10.5 in. With few exceptions, it is contained within a red border, and the magazine’s logo has remained pretty much the same since the 1990s. He works with prompts from a mercurial editor-in-chief—he has partnered with six so far—but the rest is up to D.W., who collaborates with TIME’s talented designers and photo editors to recruit the world’s best artists and photographers to create covers with us.

While some covers can take months to make, some take minutes. D.W.’s strongest covers are often the simplest. We woke up the morning after the Donald Trump–Joe Biden presidential debate to a half dozen versions of what finally became the panic cover we published later that day. Sometimes, saying just a little can leave the biggest impression. We asked several former TIME editors-in-chief how they remember their time working with D.W.

Edward Felsenthal

D.W. is far more than TIME’s creative director—though of course that’s no small job in itself. He’s a maestro of visual storytelling who has played an integral role in TIME’s transformation. As its name implies, TIME is not static. It’s constantly evolving to reflect the world it chronicles. And in an era of instant news, vastly altering the role of a magazine, D.W. has been instrumental in ensuring TIME’s enduring impact.

You can see that in the almost magical ambition he brings to what’s possible in a small print or digital frame—like the public artist JR’s Guns in America cover, which brought together 245 people on all sides of the gun debate—and then off the page in the form of a multimedia experience that traveled the country. Or Japanese artist Toshihiko Hosaka’s How Earth Survived, a life-size sand sculpture created over 14 days to convey the shared work of addressing climate change. Or replacing the TIME logo —for the very first time—with the word vote ahead of the 2020 presidential election on a Shepard Fairey image, under-scoring the imperative to exercise our democratic right. D.W. has shown time and again that the power of storytelling lies as much in how we see as in what we read.

Nancy Gibbs

TIME’s newsroom always hummed with energy, curiosity, creativity—and D.W.’s office was its nerve center. There was something magical about having a sometimes random mix of writers, editors, passersby, curled around D.W.’s screen staring into his creative process.

We watched as he swapped images; we litigated cover lines; we argued fiercely over fairness, clarity, the choice between seizing the moment and playing for history. Through so many years, so many stories, D.W. was our teacher and conscience, able to translate even vague ideas into unforgettably sharp images—and often providing just the right cover line as well. 

He was an editor’s dream; I remember one very high-stakes news cycle, when we had a rare division about what to put on the cover. We were close to deadline, the editors were deadlocked; when I sought refuge in D.W.’s office, he told me he thought I might decide I needed an alternative, and pulled out an entirely new cover image that he had commissioned overnight. Which was brilliant. And went on to win awards for the cover of the year.

Richard Stengel

D.W. may actually have the perfect human temperament: sunny, never riled, always positive, even, and unruffled. I never heard him raise his voice or get cross with anyone. He was a perfect collaborator because he did not have that ego-driven attachment to his own work. He was looking for the best image to illustrate the story. That’s powerful journalism. He tended to look at last-minute changes, or breaking news, as a fun challenge rather than a piece of bad luck. That’s a useful trait at a newsmagazine. As a culture, we tend to associate creativity with eccentricity or being temperamental. Not D.W. He is endlessly creative while being as steady as an airline pilot.

D.W.’s style is clean, clear, not dandified, not cute!—he always went for the cover that did the most justice to the subject. I was always a sucker for beautiful covers (which didn’t necessarily fly off the newsstand!), and I love the work of art that he commissioned from the artist Ai Weiwei for the China cover that looks like an ancient red-and-white Chinese woodcut. The cover that made me lose sleep was the one of Aisha, the Afghan young woman—What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan—who had had her nose sliced off by the Taliban. It was a disturbing image, but the young woman’s courage and pride—and beauty—shone through.

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Creating the most valuable real estate in media, D.W. knows that the cover is not just shared by those of us who work at TIME but is also a touchstone for millions of people around the world. To his credit, he carries that responsibly both seriously and lightly, starting each edition with the same blank canvas as the week before. Now, back to work on number 1,001.