For the December issue of Runner’s World, we reached out through social media to real runners, and invited them to participate in our “Runner’s Body” feature. We immediately received photos from hundreds of interested people from all over the country. Over the next few weeks we narrowed the list down to 22 runners with very different body types. We enlisted Seattle-based photographer José Mandojana — whom I worked with quite a bit during my days at Seattle Met — and flew him to Los Angeles, Houston and New York City for a series of daylong shoots. (He writes about the experience here.) .
Here’s the newsstand cover:
I persuaded the editors to try something different for subscribers:
Some feature spreads I designed:
Also in the December issue is a story about runners getting to know of one another through social media like Twitter and Facebook, and how that can lead to forming real-life running groups and friendships. In the feature meeting where the editors and art department first discussed this story, I was looking at photos of candidates for the “Runner’s Body” feature that were still lying on the table. I snapped a photo of one runner’s face with my iPhone, then laid the phone down onto the body of another runner. Then I pitched it as the concept for the art treatment for the story:
Here’s how my final layout it turned out:
Runner’s World China, the latest international edition of the brand, also used the story and layout in their November 2012 issue. But they replaced head shots of a couple of our models with photos of Chinese women. I love that they even had their main character stick her tongue out, like in ours.
Here’s another spread from my layout:
I inherited this great portrait of Debbie Heald when I arrived at Runner’s World in July. The story had been scheduled to run before I joined the staff, but was subsequently held for later in the year. Combing through the photos from that original shoot, I noticed a framed, 40-yeard-old picture of Debbie in all her glory. It was adorned with medals and a faded, wallet-size high school portrait of Debbie. I told my staff that we had to get that frame as-is into our studio, where we would photograph it to complete the opening diptych. The frame and some scrapbooks I also requested arrived in a Fed-Ex box a couple days later, and we got some great art out of it:
Press clippings and old photos from Debbie’s impressive youth were preserved in the scrapbooks she sent us:
Even though this work was published in the December issue, we completed and shipped it to the printer in October, just in time for Runner’s World‘s first-ever half-marathon and festival. Here’s a shot I snapped of the SteelStacks in Bethlehem, PA — about 10 miles or so from the Runner’s World headquarters, where workers were putting up the starting line.
It was really cool seeing some of the photos from the “Runner’s Body” feature blown up to wall-size and displayed inside the gear tent.
The festival was such a success that we’re already planning the second one for next October.
