Eye-Popping Mag Cover Pulls Out All The Stops

If ever a magazine cover screamed, "Someone worked hard on this," it's the 1000th issue of Rolling Stone.

The venerable rock-n-roll mag's milestone issue, on newsstands Friday, features a dizzying photo collage showing 154 different figures from the magazine's 39-year history, all on stage at a concert.

As if that's not enough, the whole Sgt. Pepper-esque affair pops out in 3D, printed on plastic using lenticular technology.

The result isn't perfect. The busy image, which looks sharp on flat paper or a computer screen, is hampered by the blurriness that's inherent with most lenticular images. A Target advertisement on the back of the magazine ? a simpler photograph of four people waving lighters as if at a concert ? makes better use of the 3D technology and even incorporates a few frames of animation.

Still, the cover stands out for its sheer ambition. The image was created by Michael Elins, a photographer who specializes in digital manipulation and has worked on many eye-catching magazine covers.

"I felt a tremendous amount of responsibility," to Rolling Stone, Elins says. "This piece sprang from a dreamlike place in your brain."

Dreamlike, maybe, but it must have been a photo researcher's nightmare. Subjects include everyone from Chuck Berry to Eminem, from Gwen Stefani to Jack Kerouac, from Bono to Waldo. The magazine had to locate iconic photos of each star and secure the rights to every image. It took months to put it all together, and the credits fill a quarter page near the back of the magazine.

"Of all the subjects we researched in this piece, we wanted them to be at their most iconic status," Elins says. In some cases, Elins photographed body doubles and blended the celebrity's head onto the body. The magazine's creative staff decided to leave black-and-white photos as they were rather than colorize them.

The special cover reportedly cost an extra $1 million, through the magazine won't confirm that figure. The cover price is $5.95, two bucks more than a usual Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner gets credit for proposing the 3D idea, while art director Amid Capeci, director of photography Jodi Peckman, and their staffs executed the concept. John Dragonetti, director of editorial operations, handled production.

Rolling Stone sent the image to National Graphics as a 12-layer Photoshop file, with each layer representing a different dimension in 3D space. "It was almost a terabyte or some ridiculously huge amount of information," Capeci says.

The cover was actually produced in January, with the 3D part being printed in Wisconsin by National Graphics (through its Extreme Vision brand). It was then applied with glue to the paper cover of the magazine at its regular printing plant in Oklahoma. A flat version of the same image is behind the 3D sticker.

Lenticular imaging employs a textured plastic lens to fool the eye into seeing a 3D image. It can also be used to show a few frames of animation when an image is tilted side to side. It has typically been used as a gimmick ? movie posters like Independence Day and Zathura, postcards, school notebook covers, religious illustrations, and so on. National Graphics hopes the Rolling Stone cover will elevate the technique to a new level.

"This is a milestone for us," says Jeff Heckers, senior technical advisor at National Graphics. "We saw this as being a very high profile job."

Rolling Stone editors dictated which celebrities belonged in the first and second row. They positioned Kurt Cobain as an angel and Hunter S. Thompson as a devil hovering overhead, and Bart Simpson swinging on a rope over the logo.

Beyond that, placement was usually for aesthetic reasons. Elins warns against reading too much symbolism in the way the rest of the picture is arranged.

"I got a call from a guy at the lenticular image company who said, 'Hey, Johnny Cash next to David Bowie, I get it.' I said, 'Cool, I don't,'" Elins says.

Helpfully, there is a key in the magazine identifying everyone in the photo. Some of the small, blurry faces in the back are especially tricky. We found our copy of the cover looks sharpest when viewed at a slight tilt looking down at the top of the picture ? the way a shopper might see it when perusing a newsstand.

Elins sees his cover as an example of how digital technology has changed the nature of photography.

"I feel like there's a real shift in the way work is getting done now," he says. "Photography is becoming almost an ingredient in a bigger recipe."

Related links

• Extreme Vision


• Rolling Stone