Time magazine has just announced its choices for the Top 10 Magazine Covers of 2008.

Here’s the cover that its editors ranked as #1, from the issue of New Yorker which ran following the presidential election.

While I liked the concept, it comes off a little too dark for me. Perhaps it was more legible on glossy paper than when seen made entirely out of pixels.

My personal favorite from the finalists is this one from Los Angeles magazine, which the editors of Time ranked as #8.

It’s the most daring of the finalists, so much so that I’m actually a little surprised that the publisher let the creatives get away with it. Says Geraldine Hessler at Glamour magazine:

“For the September issue of Los Angeles, art director Joe Kimberling collaborated with illustrator and type designer Marian Bantjes to create the cover. The solution, done solely with a blue ballpoint pen, is a notebook covered with doodles inspired by a creative, yet distracted high school student. As Marian says on the contributors page ‘I did everything but the bar code.'”

Even though that one was my favorite, I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for MAD magazine. Here’s its entry, which came in at #10.

I’d have ranked it higher.