Our Bauhaus coronavirus cover
Our recent issue publishes findings from leading researchers on an urgent quest for a vaccine against SARS-Cov-2. Vaccine development is usually a process that takes years of research and clinical trials, but teams around the world have been working at record speed to identify and develop potential candidates.
For the cover of this special issue, we enlisted the talents of staff Senior Illustrator Nik Spencer. The brief was to develop an image that spoke to Covid vaccine development generally, covering the breadth of the research represented in the issue, and to avoid the usual spherical, spiky depiction of the virus as a main element. We landed on a design inspired by Bauhaus
We’ve asked Nik to give us a behind-the-scenes guide to the cover:
“The main challenge when coming up with a cover concept for our vaccines special issue was to celebrate this global scientific effort, whilst avoiding the kind of coronavirus imagery that has saturated the media in recent months. We wanted to steer clear of syringes and globes and — if possible — not make the virus the main element.
Bauhaus was a German modern art movement in the early 20th century that encompassed all facets of design. It involved radical thinking on how to incorporate core artistic principles into everything from architecture to typography. It promoted problem-solving and collaboration between disciples, to work towards functional, effective design solutions. I thought that this would work as a perfect theme to represent the endeavour of the research community as it faces the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I chose the notebooks of Paul Klee — a champion of the movement — as a basis for my cover. I was drawn to the scrawled notes, annotations and bold colour studies. I felt they conveyed experimentation, novel thinking and rapid work. In particular, I thought a primary colour wheel (that already resembled a virus!) could be a good starting point.
My early ideas used one bold colour element, surrounded by notes about virus structure and vaccine types. Finally we decided to have two main colour elements, with the virus secondary, but as the starting point of three parts. The first part would use the wheel to convey studies of the virus, with wedges to represent how its structure and genome have been rapidly resolved and analysed. From this comes potential vaccine candidates, using an infographic I produced back in April as a basis for these elements.
The next part — and the main focus — was the antibody, as a defined representation of the goal of immunity and immune response. The final part was scrawled columns of figures, depicting numbers of vaccines at various stages of clinical trials. I added notes and annotations over the illustration to give a sense of study and rapid progression through the experimental, testing and clinical trial processes. The result is an imagined page from the notebook of vaccine design.”
We hope this cover serves as a shot in the arm to those weary of seeing conventional depictions of the virus, and inspires hope and creativity in the research community and beyond.
Thanks for reading. For more like this, please see our blog archive.
