TIME Magazine is celebrating it’s centenary this year, and this week sees the release of the Centennial Edition of the renowned news magazine. The magazine’s creative director, D.W. Pine,was tasked to create the cover of this special edition of the iconic red frame magazine.
I am frequently asked, as creative director of TIME, to choose my favorite cover in the magazine’s history—a history that now covers a full century. It’s a question I typically avoid, given that any one answer leaves too many covers on the cutting-room floor. However, on the occasion of TIME’s 100th birthday, I decided to answer the question (sort of)—by picking not just one favorite cover, but 100, one from each year in TIME’s history.
Some years the choice was obvious: the provocative typographic “Is God Dead” from 1966; the memorable “Yep, I’m Gay” cover with Ellen DeGeneres in 1997; the powerful black-bordered Sept. 11, 2001, cover. But some years it was difficult to pick just one. (I have nearly a dozen favorites in 1968 alone, though 1950’s “World & Friend”—the iconic image of the earth drinking a Coke—is the only cover I have hanging in my house.)
The final cover includes 144 previous cover images, with at least one taken from each year of the magazine’s history.
The 144 images that appear in the resulting grid were selected from the more than 5,000 issues we’ve put out over the last 100 years—zoomed in to offer a new perspective on the iconic images.
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The original unzoomed covers:
