Inspiration

The Best Covers in 40 Years: Who Made Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine Look Interesting?

Darina Solodova February, 15 2016

When Richard Turley started as a creative director at Bloomberg Businessweek, he immediately freshened-up the boring cover design of a classic business magazine. Even the legend of advertisement design, George Lois, admitted he hadn’t seen anything like this since the 1970s. Bird In Flight asked Oleg Nobr to select the best covers that helped Turley breathe new life into the magazine.

Richard Turley started as creative director at Bloomberg Businessweek in 2010. At that time he only had a BA from Liverpool Art School and experience at G2, a supplement to The Guardian newspaper. “I was younger and inexperienced, really totally out of my depth, but pretending everything was OK and bluffing that I knew what I was doing”, — Turley describes his early days at the magazine in his Designboom interview.

One of his first decisions was using Helvetica font on the cover. “Helvetica is such an overused, tedious typeface that to base a redesign around it, might be considered quite brave”, — Turley says.

In Bloomberg Businessweek, Turley has around 15 people in his department, and prefers to work with professionals with a broad set of skills: photo editors who can draw and designers who can do charts, illustrations and take photographs.

In only a year Turley drew attention to a redesigned magazine, and in 2011, George Lois, a legend of the magazine and advertisement industry, said that Turley’s works were the best selection of magazine covers in 40 years. Bloomberg Businessweek was praised for breaking the traditional rules for design of a business weekly and provocative covers.

In 2011, Adweek magazine called Turley the “Hottest Creative Player”, and at the end of 2013 TheVerge.com put him on the Verge 50 list of “the people who changed our lives this year”. For his work, Turley has received awards from D&AD, Art Directors Club, Society of Publication Designers, and The Society for News Design and others. Also, his creative department at Businessweek was selected creative department of the year by Creative Review Studio in 2012, and received the Best Magazine Design award from Magpile.

In April 2014, the MTV channel invited Turley to work as “first senior vice president of visual storytelling and deputy editorial director”, a position invented especially for him. Turley’s main task is to create original visual images to illustrate the news.

You can find more covers of the magazine on Bloomberg Businessweek’s Flickr.