This Daft Punk article might be a suitable replacement for the author.
Matt Dennewitz Neil Wargo Andrew Gaerig
They do amazing work with the Cover Story series. A blog post from them showing off their techniques would gain a huge amount of traction, at least here on HN
edit: here are our cover stories: http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/. we've been at it for a while, and you can see where the idea grew legs, learned to walk, and took off. pretty neat.
What would be interesting too is how the visual designers work, i.e. for the cover stories. The imagery and visual language of the music industry is totally different from what typically goes on HN, and would be a really interesting contrast.