Rarely are the images and words that land on our front cover the very first things we imagined. Now we are sharing a bit of our creative process—and some not-quite-ready-for-prime-time players—in this Rejects Uncovered section. Here, we offer a glimpse of would-be Pitt Med covers that never saw the light of the newsstand. It should be noted that our rock star art director, Elena Cerri, works directly with talented contributing artists to make these covers happen.

Winter 2016

Illustrator Stacy Innerst created this Lichtenstein-esque cover concept for us. Here we are working on the “correlation is not causation” idea that speaks to our cover story.

That was fun, but, sigh, perhaps it would have had too many people thinking about inappropriate relations among labmates. Anyway, who can resist Rube Goldberg meets an unpredictable cat?

Our chosen cover, the playful Stacy Innerst machine (he offered a few options that we built on), symbolizes the muddle that scientists find themselves up against with big data—a multitude of variables tend to show up that obfuscate attempts to draw accurate linkages about what’s really affecting our health. The handsome cat was inspired by the recently deceased Abbey, 18-year-old feline companion to Pitt Med board member Maggie McDonald.   —Erica Lloyd