George Lois and Esquire magazine

When I worked at Dose I found the Esquire magazine covers created by the legendary George Lois in the sixties a big inspiration. They were original, thought provoking and gutsy. I was doing some research today and found that George has a fancy new site that showcases the covers nicely. You can check them all out if you like but here are a few of my favorites:

270 Dose magazine covers

Before GigPark I was lucky enough to be part of Dose, as the founding editor-in-chief. Helping to build, launch and run this Canadian media company was one of the most exciting projects I have ever been involved in. The team were incredible and CanWest gave us a lot of freedom to have fun and build a good product.

Here are a few stats about Dose:

Magazine, website and mobile platform launched on April 4th 2005
Approximately 70 staff bassed in Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver
By May 2006 we had:
> 331K daily readers of our magazine
> One-in-ten 18-24 year olds read the magazine daily
> 200K monthly unique visitors to dose.ca
> 76% brand awareness amongst 18-34 year olds
Dose was closed on May 17th 2006

One of my favorite jobs at Dose was helping create the cover each day. We would come up with a few ideas in the morning news meeting and then at noon would huddle up and answer the following questions:

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

Our creative director, deputy editors and culture editor were always at the noon meeting along with one guest contributor. Sometimes the meetings were a fun 15 minutes, and sometimes they were a difficult hour, but the results were something we were proud of more often than not. Maybe the most amazing thing was the fact that after the meeting the designers, editors, photographers and illustrators had only 7 short hours to execute the idea and create the cover.

Every single member of the Dose staff contributed to our covers, but these people were instrumental:

Jaspal Riyait, Creative Director
Duncan Clark, Deputy Editor
Ryan MacDonald, Deputy Editor
Basem Boshra, Deputy Editor
Ronit Novak, Photo Editor
Jordan MacInnis, Photo Editor
Celine Wong, Culture Editor
Teena Aujla, Associate Art Director
Daniel DeSouza, Designer

Here are a few of my favorite Dose covers. Click on them to view the full flickr set:
(I promise to put all 270 of them on flickr when I find the time)