The Atlantic Ideas Issue

This year's edition of The Atlantic's annual Ideas issue focuses on creativity and "how genius happens." To celebrate the theme, the magazine invited three leading artists and designers to create images for a collection of cover for the issue, each highlighting a different aspect of creativity.

For his cover, Pentagram's Eddie Opara rendered the brain as a colorful network of lines and connections. The illustration accompanies "Secrets of the Creative Brain," an article by the neuroscientist Nancy C. Andreasen about the brain processes that foster creativity. In his note about the cover series, Atlantic Creative Director Darhil Hooks says Opara presents "the brain—an unfathomably complex organ—as an object both simple and beautiful." Other covers for the issue were created by Shepard Fairey and Geoff McFetridge.