NFPA Journal magazine covers - Doug Sternberg's Portfolio

This was the first of two concept covers for the BrandRI. We were looking for a little bit of attitude in our work.

This cover is actually for the inaugural issue. We were fortunate to 'get' then governor Gina Raimondo for the feature story. Governor Raimondo had just succeeded in overhauling Rhode Island's long-troubled state employee pension fund. (As you move through the remainder of BrandRI layouts, the sequence goes from cover to cover story opening layout.)

I was hired at NFPA to lead the art direction of the organization's member magazine.

I saw a magazine built as a trade publication. It wasn't delivering the humanity of fire and life safety. It was providing fire and life safety news.

If you want to publish a magazine—tell stories. Show life. Show decisions and consequence. Isn't that the essence of life safety? Split decisions that save lives? Preparation for calamity? Learning from catastrophe?

So, what you see in the following slides—through cover art and feature story layouts—is my effort to push the magazine toward the human side of trying to preserve life in dangerous situations.

The next six slides are cover layouts I selected after our redesign of the magazine in December of 2015.

As I mentioned earlier in this gallery, I wanted the magazine to look like it belongs on newsstands. I think our redesign reflects that.

The spread above is a story we did on the meteoric rise in human trafficking around the world and how NFPA is working with U.S. local law enforcement and first responders to combat these horrible crimes.