Pentagram partner DJ Stout and designer Barrett Fry in our Austin office have been designing LMU Magazine, the magazine of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, since they reworked it in 2010. At the time, the Austin team changed the publication's name from Vistas to LMU Magazine, created LMU Magazine Online, and developed an LMU Magazine App for tablets and mobile. Stout and Fry have collaborated with the magazine's talented Art Director Maureen Pacino and Editor Joe Waklee-Lynch since the launch issue of the redesign. The new Fall 2013 issue includes a feature on LMU alumnus Van Partible, who created the cartoon classic "Johnny Bravo" while he was a student. Partible sports a "Bravo-esque" bouffant on the front cover of the publication, and his two-dimensional alter-ego shows off the animator's towering inspiration on the back cover (watch a short film about the cover shoot on LMU Magazine Online).

"Maureen, Joe, and photographer Jon Rou, who shot the Van Partible cover, have been a total joy to work with over the years," says Stout. "They are always open to new ideas. At first Maureen thought my cover concept was totally nuts, but she gave it a chance. Van, who is originally from the Philippines, was a good sport to go along with this crazy thing."

"It was an outlandish, outrageous, impossible idea, and we were just foolhardy enough to follow DJ there," said Pacino. "Everyone is talking about it, and our page views exploded two days ago when we started hitting mailboxes."

Last August, LMU Magazine and its staff won three awards in the 2013 University and College Designer's Association (UCDA) Design Competition. Since LMU Magazine's launch in July 2010, the redesigned publication has won 21 national and regional awards, including a prestigious Gold Award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).

"I've designed a lot of different kinds of publications, and I'm constantly trying to get my clients to use humor as an editorial tool," says Stout. "If done right it can be a very memorable and effective way to communicate. It's hard to get corporations and higher education institutions to lighten up a bit and to quit taking themselves so seriously. It's refreshing to have a collaborator like LMU who will take a chance with a light-hearted idea like this one every now and then."

The LMU Magazine staff working with Pentagram Austin have created several humorous covers over the years including the Fall 2011 issue which handled a fairly serious subject, commercial space flight, with an absurd, double-take inducing portrait of a business entrepreneur wearing a space helmet, and the Fall 2012 cover which featured a big yellow smiley face for an issue about the university's successful capital campaign. Both covers had the potential to be dull, run-of-the-mill cover solutions.

"From the very beginning we've tried to utilize the front and the back covers of LMU Magazine." says Stout, "Most university and alumni magazines don't have to run a full page ad on the back cover the way most commercial newsstand publications do, so we've tried to make the best of that fortunate situation. Sometimes we feature two separate images on the front and back that play off of one another and sometimes it's a single image that wraps all the way around. I love the interplay of the two covers. It's become a major part of LMU Magazine's visual personality."