Behind the Scenes of our Jenny Slate Cover

Welcome to our Winter 2022 digital issue! The theme of our inaugural 2022 issue is Creators–celebrating, highlighting, and exploring the future of creatives in various industries. Especially right now when we know so many people are reevaluating their career paths, it felt like the perfect moment to highlight the people who are pursuing their passions and making being a creator their full-time job.

So, what does being a creator really mean? Well, I'm going to steal our cover star, Jenny Slate's, definition to answer that question. "It means being able to joyfully reach into that part in my psyche and my heart where there is something happy and good and to gently bring it out into the world," Slate says. "Whether that’s in my work or in what I think we should have for dinner [or] how I make my bed. It just means using that nice part as much as possible." I love that concept: bringing the nicest bits of our hearts and brains—our passions, ideas, and little bits of genius—and sharing them with others. 

We applied that idea to every aspect of this issue, from dreaming up and executing the cover to choosing the women and non-binary folks we're celebrating in "21 Creators to Watch in '22." We partnered with Adobe on the issue, which felt like a no-brainer. Their mission is to enable creativity for all and to provide the tools for storytellers all over the world to express themselves. The Adobe team helped curate our creators-to-watch list, which spans art, beauty, filmmaking, fashion, music, social activism, social media influencing, and technology. There's also something of a cheatsheet for creators looking to up their branding: "10 Easy Ways to Express Yourself" lays out design and storytelling tactics to elevate content with the assistance of Adobe Creative Cloud Express.

Elsewhere in the issue, you'll find a deep dive into the ways social media companies, including TikTok, Snapchat, and Meta, are competing to attract and sustain creators on their platforms. In an intimate essay, actress Deepika Padukone shares how her family and upbringing shaped her perspective on beauty and ultimately inspired her to create a new beauty and wellness brand launching later this year. In "Creating for Change: Art as Activism," three artists share how their art inspires change and resonates in an increasingly politicized world. In our fashion feature, you can see what happened when we challenged five designers to create a custom piece out of only denim scraps (courtesy of FabScrap), deadstock, or upcycled material. (Spoiler: I'm desperate to get my hands on the trench!)

And then of course, we have our profile of Jenny Slate. Slate is a creator in every sense of the word—artist, comedian, author, and actress—so she felt like the perfect (and hysterical, kind, introspective, resilient, and delightful) person to front our Creators Issue. As for the cover itself, we knew we wanted to get, well, creative, and to do something we hadn't done before. Photographer Ramona Rosales shot Slate at a studio in L.A., employing everything from dollies to actual humans brandishing streamers to create motion effects for her photos, gifs, and videos. From there, post-production studio Bespoke took the assets and streamlined them, adding animation and some fun bells and whistles (the sparkle on the Miu Miu blouse! The blur effect when Slate looks up at the Marie Claire logo!) to make the design Art Director Tova Diamond dreamed up come alive. From ideation to creation to execution, we used a host of Adobe tools—Bridge, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, AfterEffects, Premiere Pro, and Creative Cloud Express—to make it all happen. And because so much went into making the cover, we created a behind-the-scenes video so you can see our creative process from footage capture to final product.

I'm so excited for you to dig into this issue. We tried to put all the happy and good from our psyches and our hearts into these stories. Hopefully you'll get as much joy out of reading them as we got in creating them.

Click here to read the full Creators Issue.