I sat in the art director’s chair at Washington City Paper for eight years. It was a job I loved, and when I finally left I thought a lot about what I was leaving behind. I had good friends there, I knew I’d miss the fun and relentless schedule of a weekly publication, and the sort of addictive, hub-of-the-universe environment you find only at an alt weekly or daily newspaper.

Much to my surprise, I also found myself dwelling on the fact that I’d probably never work at a place where I’d get to do so much graphic satire. During my tenure, I had occasion to visually mock the typography and style of The Washington Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Post Magazine, the supermarket tabloids, Boy’s Life ca. 1957, The Department of Homeland Security, Jack Chick and, as a capstone to my time there, the Post’s Express before it even came out. There were lots of others.

It’s fun to make fun of other publications, but more than this designing a fake cover, a page, or a few pages is an enjoyable technical challenge. From a model or two, you must decode the DNA, figure out fonts and leading and spacing, and turn it into usable style sheets and templates, and it all must usually be done quickly.

What’s best about it though is you can get out of your own head for a while. You don’t have to worry about what you think is effective design, what’s right for your publication or what should and shouldn’t be done with art, text and photos—your visual vocabulary is irrelevant—what’s important is how someone else does those things. It’s the closest designers come to being character actors.

Predominantly a shot off the bow at Bono, you can still see the graphic joy in these fake covers which appear on the last page of the current Esquire. More send-up covers can be found at Magazines of the Future.