Oooops!

mildly amusing, sure, but a "gaffe"? why?

If I were a graphics designer and I did it, I'd call it a gaffe and would be blushing for days. Perhaps my foreignness misses subtle meanings of the word?

Oh, it's funny - I am not implying anything sinister or serious. These kinds of things happen. I only put it in the "Fun" category.

no, I grasp that you think there is something to be mildly embarrassed about. I'm just not seeing why.

Score one for the graphics designer.
This is not going to generate bad PR.

Well, I guess it is an honest mistake, but this kind of humor just does not fit with the serious image of the magazine. Mismatch is the source of all humor. Doing it by mistake is embarassing - nothing wrong with blushing if you made a mistake, is it?

Classic. I love it.

DM, I'm guessing you share Steven Colbert's "gift" of not being able to see race.

does the designer of the front cover have any idea what ad is going on the back cover? In most news organizations there is a wall between sales and content. The graphics designer would have nothing to do with this coincidence. Maybe the editor should have opened the issue up like this but at worst this is a slightly silly error.

I see race just fine, Mungbean. What I don't get is why any graphic designer needs to feel anything at all other than "gee, we did make a slightly odd juxtaposition there, didn't we".

are you all suggesting there is something racially offensive in this? that had you noticed this as an editor you would have replaced the ad content in some way? or selected a cover design that did not picture the two candidates? what?

ROFLMAO!

Sales collects a gazillion bucks for the back cover and the client submits their own finished ad according to publication specs. Design does its thing with the front cover according to what Editorial wants, and Layout just puts it there. No one really has control.

Even the people who put the inside together and have some control over what goes where can miss the funny juxtapositions. My kid bro has been a graphic designer for 20-some years, and he says [1] several people are usually working independently on different segments, and [2] they're so concerned with making everything fit and meeting their deadline that they don't notice anything funny until later. OTOH, [3] a lot of them have funky senses of humor and have been known to do it accidently-on-purpose occasionally. You never can tell......... and of course they'll never admit it...... :-)

DM: Well, given that Obama has been called "sexist" for using the phrase "lipstick on a pig," I'd say the folks at Nature would at least be concerned about the snickers if, say, this blows up into a big deal on Digg.com.

I agree, it's basically just a funny juxtaposition. I might have switched the dog pictures if I had been editor and noticed in time.

genijalci :-))

I won't really be impressed until they do a fold-in like MAD magazine.

LOL @ James F!

The red collars on the two woofs and the red neckties on the two candidates make me think it was an "accidentally-on-purpose" graphic juxtaposition. If it was intentional, I say we take a few additional humor lessons from the Brits. It would be quite a stretch for someone to find it even mildly offensive, but then there is a societal trend, at least in the US, towards taking umbrage/nitpicking/searching for aggravation and trouble.

Hmmmmmmmmmm......... and I didn't even notice the red collars. Good eye, Barn Owl (which I suppose is to be expected from a creature of your Prodigious and Legendary Visual Acuity)!

Not to sound specist, but the dogs look smarter. Maybe we should elect them instead.

Ooooops!

Speaking of unfortunate juxtapositions:

http://gawker.com/5054987/ha-ha-companies-spend-billions-fine+tuning-an…

Does the McCain dog have a graying muzzle, or is that a trick of the light?

No, no, no. This is not something that anyone could have "done anything" about, even if it had been noticed.

1) The front cover is put together by the editorial dept and by art. It often involves a completely separate shoot from anything else done for the magazine. Unlike other edit content and artwork, it also has to be seen and signed-off on by the publisher, the circulation manager, and usually several other people. It CAN'T be swapped out at the last minute.

2) The back cover is sold as a back cover--the three most prestigious, non-negotiable positions being a) inside the front cover, b) back cover, c) inside the back cover (also "opposite TOC," "first seven pages," "right page, full edit," etc.--I could go on and on . . .).

3) As magazines are being compiled they are usually laid out on a wall--sometimes two walls (one for editorial, one for advertising). Whoever is doing the final check to make sure that there's no conflict between editorial and advertising is looking for:
- Any ads across from editorial that look too similar (and, no: no sane person worries what C1 and C4 look like together, because THAT'S NOT HOW PEOPLE READ MAGAZINES!).
- Ads with similar content that look like they might be promoting products in the editorial opposite them.
- "Competitive Separation"--IF TWO SIMILAR PRODUCTS HAVE ADS PLACED TOO CLOSE TOGETHER--LESS THAN 5-8 PAGES, SAY--YOU LOSE YOUR JOB.
- Use of bright colors that will "bleed" on a web press, based on the imposition used, and mess up the look of pages that aren't near them chronologically, but will be next to them on the web press.

Had the cover image been one of Condi and Bush, I might have done something about it, since there's a particularly nasty connotation about calling a woman a dog. (Same thing if one of the politicians were from the Middle East.) But as it is, it's just a cute juxtaposition that one has to do something completely unnatural to even see--lay C1 and C4 against each other, which only Martians do. And any equivalence between the cute puppies and the not-as-cute politicians is bipartisan. It's fine.

But moving that ad--promised on C4--means getting that advertiser's permission, as well as the permission of the advertiser on C2 (the only other equivalent position) to swap them, and than making sure that this action didn't create much worse problems for the non-Martians who read magazines in a normal way.

You do that without the permission of the editor, the publisher, and the account reps for both of those advertisers, and you get fired. Which means you have to wake them all up at midnight, and they have to call the clients at midnight.

The cover is FINE. It's cute, but you have to do the Martian thing to even know it's there.

great!!!
Dan