“The first step in selling is stopping the eye.” That’s a line from a Time magazine description of George Lois, maybe the most provocative art director of the modern era.
Decades before Photoshop made such tricks easier, Lois had an uncanny ability to compress complex ideas into simple and striking images. His work for Esquire is the stuff of legend. He drowned Andy Warhol in a can of soup and showed Richard Nixon being primped and powdered by a makeup artist. His masterwork, for the April 1968 issue, gave us the ex–heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali bristling with arrows in a do-over of the third-century martyrdom of St. Sebastian. A generation of designers emulated Lois’s risk taking. In fact, he is largely the reason the history of print magazines is a history of unforgettable covers—Life’s Vietcong prisoner with his eyes and mouth taped shut, Rolling Stone’s naked John Lennon straddling Yoko Ono, Vanity Fair’s pregnant (and also nude) Demi Moore. These visual markers have stuck around longer than the stories they were associated with.
