The Man Whose Magazine Covers Changed America
The late graphic designer George Lois profoundly influenced generations of artists.
Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on November 22, 2022.
As a freelance art director for Esquire in the 1960s, George Lois assailed Muhammad Ali with arrows, drowned Andy Warhol in a can of soup, and prepped Richard Nixon’s profile for a close-up. He stunned minds to attention, making magazine covers that spoke so urgently, they muted an entire newsstand’s worth of bold headlines. Through Lois’s work, history was reified.
I wasn’t alive in the
