Our Favorite 25 Wired Covers of All Time

Much like a blockbuster movie poster or a photo on a book of donut recipes, a magazine cover is an essential opportunity to grab a reader and tell them what delicious stories are inside, with as much wit and visual persuasion possible. And while the Bengali typhoon of the digital revolution may have wiped away the importance of a print cover to sell magazines, the cover is still very important to us as a piece of design work and a symbolic representation of the issue. Planning the ultimate cover is an insane process. We always seem to have so much time for it … until we don't. You would think a month would always be enough, but no. Sometimes we know months in advance what the cover story is going to be; other times we don't find out until a couple weeks before we ship an issue to the printer. The same goes with cover art.