Issue #24: Summer 2009

Babies, French Fries and the Opalescent Nudibranch

by Chris Petty, MFA'86

The image on the cover of this issue of Trek Magazine is of a marine slug called the Opalescent Nudibranch. It was taken during Alumni Weekend by alumnus Calvin Hass, BASc’98, at the tidepooling event presented by UBC biology professor Chris Harley. There isn’t an article about the slug in this issue, nor is there one about Chris Harley, although he would be a good topic for an upcoming issue. There is a pictorial presentation about Alumni Weekend on page 36, but the slug isn’t really a featured performer there either.

The decision on cover images is always a difficult one. William Randolph Hearst insisted that his magazines have compelling images on their covers (“a pretty girl, a happy family or a cute dog”) to make it more likely that potential readers would pick them up at the newsstand.

Over the years we’ve tried hard to make our covers interesting. We’ve had historical photos, a baby (#2), an actor from the 1930s, a running skeleton, a seahorse, an oil painting, a tree illustration with people as roots, a little girl in a bunny mask and a plate of french fried potatoes, among others. We always hope we’ll find an image that has some relationship to an article in the mag, even if it’s just a Take Note, but it’s not always possible, nor is it necessary. For the first few issues we tied the image to a word on the cover such as ingenuity, performance, creativity and my favourite, renascence, but that became too precious after a while, and we ran out of cool words.

As long as there’s some slim connection between the cover and something UBC, our bottom line when it comes to choosing a cover shot is this: it has to be a great image.

People sometimes ask why we don’t have photos of important people on our covers: big donors, exceptional researchers, top students. Our problem here is twofold: how on earth could we ever pick one exceptional person over another, and how could we be sure to get a spectacular picture? Nothing’s worse than a magazine cover with a bad snapshot of some VIP. We did have an important person on our cover once: Amy Gyori, BSN’06, on issue #15, who had just graduated at UBCO’s first convocation. The photo was OK, but Amy had such a triumphant look on her face we thought it captured an important moment of university life. It’s still one of my favourite covers.

Some of our covers come from a commercial stock collection and cost upwards of a thousand dollars (#18, for instance, the face of an older swimmer). Some come from a UBC collection and cost nothing (#21, from the University Vault). Some come from the university archives (#s 3 and 22, for example), and some come serendipitously (#s 4, 5 and 11). And some, like the one from #23, come from talented people who work on the magazine.

We chose the photo of the slug because we thought it was a great picture, and because we realized that the last few covers have been somewhat dark and dour (a head-tax certificate, marching soldiers in gas masks and a convict illustration) and we wanted to be light and pretty this time. We also chose it because underlines UBC’s amazing diversity: someone on campus knows a hell of a lot about the nudibranch.

And that’s what we try hardest to achieve with our covers, and with of the rest of the magazine, for that matter: UBC’s uncanny ability to create wonder.

Chris Petty, MFA’86, Editor in Chief