Working Apart, Designing Together: EQUALLITY's 2022 Advocacy Cover
Updated: Aug 20
Be Super Creative | Hello Delanie Delanie West, Cover Artist, Art Director & Illustrator | 2022
The Brief
A cover for a magazine literally named for the word had to earn that title, not just print it. 2020 had handed the country a compressed history lesson, Black Lives Matter marches, a pandemic, an election, and the cover needed to hold all of it without collapsing into chaos or flattening into a poster.
The Work
This one came together the way most 2020 work did, remotely, in pieces, over calls instead of conference rooms. The pandemic had already forced a new model of collaboration on the whole industry, references shared over screens, feedback given asynchronously, the usual in-studio back-and-forth replaced with something slower and more deliberate. That shift ended up matching the format perfectly.
A halftone collage built the image the way memory actually works, in fragments, overlapping, no clean timeline. The Capitol in red, a protest sign reading "A man was lynched by police yesterday" in violet, a masked figure mid-thought, a hand casting a vote, fists raised outside the White House, all stitched into one frame instead of six separate images competing for attention. The palette did the emotional labor the headline couldn't: red urgency, violet defiance, yellow persistence.
The Translation
Most editorial covers pick a single moment to represent a story. This one refused to. The collage format let contradiction sit on the same page, grief and vote and protest and mask, because that's what the actual year looked like from the inside, and it's also what the working process looked like: separate pieces, assembled into one thing. Equality wasn't a clean concept in 2020. Neither was making the cover about it.
The Outcome
A cover that reads as a document, not decoration, sitting in someone's hands as testimony that the magazine's name was a promise, not a placeholder, and proof that new working conditions can produce work that's more layered, not less.
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