Photo Inspiration: SI edition

I mentioned that I'm on this whole retro-kick right now. Inspired by Swiss-Miss blog and mainly the Internet Explorer commercial that appeared on it. It was furthered when I saw the SI cover featuring Stan Musial (I'm a HUGE baseball fan, but not a Cards fan), there were four, yes, FOUR cover choices. I have seen this before, but I like the different designs they did with it. The different cutout styles, dek positions, and teaser layouts. I was impressed and then, on top of that, to choose which one you are going to feature, it's nice. I have seen it before, but seeing as SI is one of my favorite choices in magazines, it was even more pleasing. I'm not always impressed with SI designs, they are always cluttered and the jumps, can be a little confusing (especially when they put one story on a page in the middle of a bigger story). But I was really impressed with the style and professionalism of this designer being able to layout four different covers.
We have a design assignment that we have to do, similar to this, where we create more than one and have to choose. I'm ready for it a little more, especially after seeing this.