WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO CREATE A COVER FOR LUERZER'S ARCHIVE

Luerzers Archive is celebrating its 25th anniversary and is going to publish a special commemorative edition. The cover was created by our students Alexander Nowak and Feliks Richter while interning at Y&R New York. This is their story.

We were very happy to get the internship at Y&R NY for our 6th quarter. From the first day on Menno Kluin, a graduate of Miami Ad School, took care of us in a fantastic way. He was nurturing us with exciting briefs all the time and one day the brief for Luerzer's Archive anniversary cover came along.

We obviously were excited from the very first moment on.

Getting the chance to make something the whole ad world is gonna see, our first thought was like "GREAT!" But the second thought was more like: "We really, really shouldn't fuck this up." What's more, we only had ten days to make it happen.

From the first moment on, in every step of the process it was like, "Either it works or we're doomed!"

We brainstormed like hell, constantly reviewed with Menno and after only two days prepared a small selection with our favourite ideas to send over to Luerzer. Mr. Walter Luerzer made his choice and two days later we got the go for "The Fountain."

We started browsing the web for illustrators and finally came upon St. Louis-based artist John Hendrix. Luckily Mr. Luerzer--again--liked the choice:

The next days we spent sending sketches and corrections back and forth with John Hendrix.

At this point of the project we were the most stressed. The date of delivery was coming closer quickly and we were completely depending on our illustrator. Whenever we hadn't heard for him for longer then 24 hours we got very worried. I remember at one point of the project we were discussing the odds of John Hendrix getting the swine flu.  

At the day of our delivery deadline we received the final image. John Hendrix had done a fantastic job in a super-short time span.
The fountain looked great, he had added a lot of cool things we had not thought about. The only thing that was a bit different than what we had in mind were the colors. So, we all spent some hours in photoshop and made dozens of different color settings. When Alex found a setting that we all liked, we felt an extreme relief:

At least Menno and I did... Knowing that we were close to finish, there was nothing left to do for the two of us and so we got into a NERF gun war (NERF guns are these supercool foam bullet toy guns you can't buy in Germany but we always wanted to have.) There was heavy fighting on the 8th floor of the Y&R building  involving Miami Ad School grads Anthony Falvo and Roy Torres, who now work at Y&R.

While Alex was retouching final bits and pieces, foam bullets were passing his head all the time.

Luckily Alex is a very mild-mannered person and was willing to forgive us later on.

After uploading the file to the Luerzer's Archive server 20 minutes prior to the final deadline, we were allowed to take the rest of the day off. In fact, during the preceeding 10 days, we had only left the agency to sleep.

We all went to the cinema to see the new Terminator movie. It was Icaro's [Doria, Y&R Copywriter] idea. He still owes us those 120 minutes of our lives.

What it will do for our careers is hard to say. As a student, it is probably a good thing to have a piece in the book that almost every CD around the world might have seen before.

Working with Menno Kluin was a great experience: He is not only a really good art director but also a really creative director who gives clear instructions and clear feedback.

Working with him, his former partner Icaro Doria and Latin American Chief Creative Officer Guillermo Vega also made us clearly see how much much much more there is to do and learn for us to become good art directors one day.