The 2014 edition of The Atlantic's annual Ideas issue focused 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 covers for the issue, each highlighting a different aspect of creativity.

For our cover, Pentagram 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 Pentagram 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.