If you’re in the business, you’d have to be living under a rock to have missed book specialist Chip Kidd’s covers. But the question on every editorial art director’s mind is: What would happen if Chris designed a magazine?

Not that long ago, he did—or at least one issue of one—the Fall 2006 issue of Francis Ford Copolla’s Zoetrope All-Story. Zoetrope is a literary affair that invites a different designer to reinvent the format anew for every quarterly issue. (Frank, if you’ve been nervous about asking me, don’t be….)

Book covers are—at their best—perfectly crystallized visualizations of the core ideas in the book—they seem effortless and inevitable, but of course they are anything but. Kidd is one of the acknowledged modern masters. Magazines are a more of a nuts and bolts proposition, and a bit more dragged out. The designer has to be be able to create variety and excitement over a range of pages but within a consistent structure.

So, how did Kidd do? Well, kinda good, kinda not so good. The cover is arresting, as are many of the pages, but this owes much to the work of photographer Thomas M. Allen whose work was not commissioned but adapted for illustration. As might be expected, Kidd excels at the less formatted design opportunities like the title page and the TOC, but gives less attention to the guts. Text handling is indifferent, and pages feel tight, despite lots of dead white space due to tiny upper and lower margins. There’s also a bit too much gratuitous surprinting on the lovely photographs. More of the issue can be seen here.

In an introduction, Kidd concedes that he did not invest the time in Zoetrope as he might have liked, and it shows. Nevertheless, the magazine also offers a lot to like. If you’re going to use one artist for all imagery, it’s hard to imagine a better choice than Allen whose narrative work has both photographic and illustrative elements. The magazine is readable, and in places spectacularly lovely. It was also unlike anything else on the rack that month (or that I’ve seen matched in All-Story since.)