Stereophile is a magazine geared to the user or wannabe owner of very high-end, very pricey stereo equipment. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's a magazine for geeks. The editors spend countless hours testing these components and come up with graphs and stuff that most people frankly just don't get. Most of the photos are of black or silver boxes and have about as much personality as... a box. Although the core of the magazine would always be charts and graphs and tech-talk, I was hired to help broaden the magazine's appeal.

     

I started with the covers. While we were never going to have a sexy model in a swimsuit to boost sales, there were ways to tie headlines together with product and make the covers sexier and more interesting in their own way (to audio-geeks anyway). For my fisrt cover, I had these huge (and very expensive) speakers with a faux stone finish. They reminded me of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I decided to shoot from a low angle to increase the sense of height. Defying Stereophile tradition, I took them outside on a turbulent late summer day in Santa Fe, NM. Thankfully, the rain held off for real until after we had the shot and the thousand-something dollar speakers were safely under cover.

Inside the magazine, some of the articles lent themselves to a more fanciful interpretation. This  illustration accompanied an article on the psychology of speaker designers. I scanned in an old phrenology diagram and added one of the many speaker graphs available from the editors.
 
For a feature on a conference in San Francisco (for which the editors supplied dark photos of people, boxes and other mysterious items) I opened with a SF skyline containing speakers and other components.



Music features frequently lent themself to more playful layouts. But still, the images would often be black and white press photos, prescreened for newsprint. Playful type and tweaking the photos was key to keeping these features interesting.