The July issue of Runner’s World is dedicated almost entirely to the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15 and what they will mean for all runners going forward. For our cover, we shot a finisher’s medal from this year’s marathon—but with a piece of black tape across its front. This evokes a tradition among police officers and firefighters, who place a band of black fabric across their badges when one of their colleagues has died in the line of duty. It is mournful, but it is also a show of support and solidarity. We saw runners wearing finisher’s medals this way around Boston in the days after the race. This simple, powerful image of an object is a radical departure from a normal Runner’s World cover—appropriately so. But it was not the only cover concept we considered in the four weeks we had to produce our July issue. Here’s a look at the creative process we went through, and an explanation of how we landed where we did.

OTHER BOSTON COVERS

In the two weeks after the bombings, several magazine covers were dedicated to Boston. The two most iconic, and inspiring to us, were produced by Sports Illustrated (a photojournalistic shot of a fallen runner, Bill Iffrig, and three Boston cops springing into action) and by Boston Magazine (showing hundreds of shoes worn by runners in the marathon). Although they both set the bar very high, they were very different. One looked back in time and focused on the terror of the moment. The other alluded to the attacks but looked forward with a sense of hope. One is a document, the other a response. John Wolfson, the Editor-in-Chief of Boston Magazine, wrote in a blog, “To me, the cover is about two things: perseverance and unity. By itself each shoe in the photograph is tiny, battered, and ordinary. Together, though, they create something beautiful, powerful, and inspirational.” Since our cover wouldn’t appear for another five weeks, we decided to try and achieve a little of both—allude to the terror and tragedy of the day and move forward in time to convey the sense of hope, unity, and resilience that the running community and the city of Boston were already displaying.

Benjamen Purvis, our Design Director, pitched an idea to shoot a group of marathoners-turned-spectators. The concept would be to take all the goodwill that was in the air and reflect it back onto the actual spectators and first responders who suffered so horribly on April 15 but also fed and clothed and cared for so many runners wandering the streets with nowhere to go after the race was called off. The runner-spectators would be holding handmade signs, the kind you see all the time in the crowds at races, expressing their gratitude (“THANKS FOR GIVING ME YOUR COAT” and “THANKS FOR BRINGING ME INTO YOUR HOME”).

SOME COVERS THAT INSPIRED US

That first idea didn’t quite feel monumental enough, but it led to a discussion of shooting a much larger crowd of runners, perhaps still holding signs, on Boylston Street, where the bombs had gone off. We knew that the marathon finish line was about to be repainted there, as it is every year, and thought perhaps we could shoot a “flash mob” of runners on location gathered near the newly vivid finish line—an instant symbol of “taking back Boylston.” One inspiration for this was the terrific cover Ben produced when he was the Art Director of Seattle Met for the magazine’s “100 Reasons to Love Seattle” issue. The cover showed an actual flash mob (reason #5) dressed in red and gathered in the shape of a heart. It was shot from a helicopter, with the heart (printed in color) in the foreground and the Seattle skyline (printed in black-and-white) in the background. It was beautiful, and it said a lot without needing many cover lines.

Building from there, Ben retrieved Bloomberg Businessweek’s Election Issue. On the cover was a giant X in a giant red box—a commonly understood symbol for making a choice, or voting. But the giant X was composed of individual people shot from above and from a distance. Without employing a single cover line, the cover said “Democracy at work.” Brilliant. The cover was produced digitally, so the people weren’t real. But given the way the running community had come together in the days after the bombings, we thought we could make a similar statement about unity and resilience and hope by shooting real runners on the actual finish line in Boston, hiring a photographer to shoot down on the crowd from a helicopter. Of course, this immediately brought to mind New York Magazine’s iconic Hurricane Sandy cover, which showed a swath of Manhattan rendered utterly powerless.

This hugely ambitious idea became Plan A—our Dream Cover Scenario. But it would be immensely difficult to execute in the two weeks we had to work with. We’d have to close Boylston Street, which was still considered hallowed ground, for several hours; secure the necessary city permits; assemble the crowd of runners via Facebook, Twitter, and local running clubs (Would we get enough people? Way, way too many?) and manage them once they were there; and, assuming all of that went off without a hitch, get a shot that conveyed what we wanted to say, all without blowing our art budget for the next two issues.

Ben learned from shooting the Seattle Met cover how difficult it was to juggle all the variables—and they had “only” 240 people in their flash mob. We were confident we’d get hundreds, and perhaps thousands, more than that. To help us navigate all the hurdles, we enlisted help from a team at Arnold Worldwide, a Boston-based ad agency with extensive contacts in the city, experience in producing complex creative ideas, and a keen understanding of running (one of their clients is New Balance, whose marketing creative is outstanding). I explained the idea and shared some conceptual sketches (above) on a conference call with Maggie Smith, Todd Sperry, and Mike Howard at Arnold. They got the idea immediately and were eager to help produce something that would help the city and the running community heal. They even said they would waive any consulting fees and instead help drive donations to The One Fund. Boston Strong, indeed. The team began referring to this project as “Mission Impossible” but worked tirelessly and creatively to try and make it a reality.

Given how ambitious Plan A was going to be, we concurrently assigned a backup plan: A digital version of the “flash mob” concept—but shot at an imaginary starting line instead of the finish line, produced by Justin Metz, the artist who produced the Bloomberg Businessweek Election Issue cover. Ben did the sketch at right to guide the creative conversation.

PLANS C & D

We also experimented with two other cover concepts using images we’d already shot and had in-house. One of my favorite pieces in this issue is Writer-at-Large John Brant’s profile of 78-year-old Bill Iffrig, who became a kind of anonymous hero of the Boston attacks after appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated. In that iconic image, he was photographed from behind, so even though that picture and the video footage of him being knocked to the ground by the blast were seen around the world, few people had ever seen Iffrig’s face. His only recognizable features were his orange singlet and wispy gray hair. We are the only magazine to publish a profile of this remarkable runner, who got up to finish his race, setting the tone for all runners to carry on. We also did a photo shoot with Iffrig at his home outside Seattle, and Ben mocked up a cover (above) with him standing proudly with his finisher’s medal, wearing that same orange singlet. It was a compelling counterpoint to the SI cover that relied on the determination of a single runner to make a larger statement about the resilience of the running community post-Boston.

We also took a fresh look at an image of a finisher’s medal with a piece of black tape across its face. Photo Director Michelle Ervin had assigned photographer Stuart Tyson to shoot it as a still life against a black background, and Ben was planning to use it on the opening spread of our feature package inside the issue (below). It had a simple, iconic power, and we decided to see what it would look like as a cover.

THE WINNOWING

Alas, the hurdles for our Dream Cover shoot in Boston proved too numerous and immovable. We learned that the city had received more than 100 requests to close Boylston Street since the marathon for an array of good causes—and out of necessity had declined them all. Ours was declined, as well.

By the time we got the disappointing news, we had two other options that we were strongly considering (below): Justin Metz's digitally rendered “Dream Starting Line,” with placards spelling out BOSTON STRONG along the course’s borders, and the shot of the finisher’s medal with a piece of black tape across its face. We had decided that Bill Iffrig wasn’t recognizable enough at a glance to enough readers to carry the cover, and that an image of any single runner didn’t make a big enough statement about what was, after all, a tragedy that affected a large and diverse community.

So with less than a week before the issue had to ship, we decided to get some detailed feedback from the staff, which had been working incredibly hard to get this issue done and was especially invested in what would go on its cover. This is not the way magazine covers are chosen at most magazines—or here. Important editorial choices are not best made by committee. But Boston was an intensely personal story for us. There were more than a dozen staffers and freelancers on assignment near the finish line when the bombs went off. Four editors were running the race; Executive Editor Tish Hamilton was on Boylston and saw both explosions. Luckily, everyone escaped physical injury. But this was no ordinary issue. Working on it brought everyone deeper into the trauma. I wanted them to be proud of what we were putting out there. I wanted it to feel right to them.

We put mockups of the two covers on a bulletin board in a meeting room and asked everyone to cast a vote for one, explaining what they liked or didn’t like about each cover. One cover looked mostly back at the tragedy and struck a mournful tone. The other looked ahead with unmistakable optimism, but was a computer-generated rendering. Thirty staffers cast a vote, and the image of the finisher’s medal got 20 of them. But there was some consensus that the image was too dark and morose, that it could be construed as RW saying the Boston Marathon was dead—the exact opposite of what we were saying inside the issue.

So we asked Stuart Tyson to do another shoot and articulated a new vision to guide him: Treat the medal not as a tragic object but rather a heroic one. An idealized prize that had taken a hit but had not lost any of its meaning or luster. Over the weekend of May 4–5, Tyson shot the medal again, but against two new backgrounds, with different lighting and a piece of gaffer’s tape in place of electrical tape, which was too shiny in the first shoot. When the new shoot came in the following Monday, I knew we had our cover. It acknowledged and honored what happened in Boston while simultaneously projecting a sense of hopeful solidarity. It was mournful and optimistic all at once. (We ended up simplifying Justin Metz's illustration and using it inside the issue.)

All that was left was the cover lines. It wasn’t lost on any of us that the covers we had been inspired by all shared one characteristic: they had minimal text. We decided to achieve the same effect on the Boston-related part of the cover, while adding four simple cover lines above the logo that signaled to readers that there were articles in the issue about the topics they come to the magazine for every month. Some people urged us to strip those away and stick only to Boston. But part of the healing process we’d heard so much about in our 50-plus interviews with runners was finding a way to make sense of what happened while also finding a way to move on. We knew for certain that many of our readers would want articles about training and nutrition and motivation in the issue—and on the cover. So we found a way to balance both priorities, experimenting with several main cover lines, placing them above the medal but ultimately moving them to the lower right and upper left corners so that the medal and its symbolism would appear even stronger.

THE APRIL 1996 ISSUE OF RUNNER’S WORLD

Although this certainly wasn’t a reason for choosing our cover, I like the way it alludes to the history that Runner’s World and the Boston Marathon share. I vividly remember getting this Collector’s Issue commemorating the 100th Boston in the mail. The entire issue—with the winner’s medal from 1921 on its cover—is dedicated to the race and what makes it so special. (The April 1996 issue is available on the iPad, under the “Archive” tab within the Runner’s World app.) It cemented my desire to qualify for and run Boston myself, a goal I’m still chasing—now with a renewed sense of purpose.

Finally, in conjunction with this issue, Runner’s World and Rodale, our parent company, have made a $26,200 donation to The One Fund Boston, which supports those individuals and families who were most affected by the Boston bombings. You can also support this charity at onefundboston.org.

The July issue will begin arriving to subscribers this week and early next week. The official newsstand date is June 11, although tablet editions will go live June 5. The iPad edition, which we produced in conjunction with interactive editorial consultant Steve Malley, and designers Robert Priest and Grace Lee of the design firm Priest + Grace, features several multimedia enhancements and exclusive stories that do not appear in print.

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David Willey is the editor-in-chief of Runner's World. Follow him on Twitter @dwilleyRW.

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