—Art Direction and Set Art by Jana Frost for TIME; Photography by Stefano Giuliano for TIMEMany of the people on TIME100 Next, our annual list of the most influential rising stars, seem to have come out of nowhere, somehow magicking themselves into the culture, seizing the zeitgeist, or leapfrogging their industries with little advance notice. Take our three cover subjects: the singer Raye, comedian Druski, and actor Ashley Padilla. In 2026, Raye has flown through a 51-stop tour and released a No. 1 album. Druski has leveled up his platform-perfected comedy to Hollywood. And Padilla has become a star on Saturday Night Live through her viral performances.The sets for our covers, painstakingly assembled by the creative director Jana Frost, are meant to show these arrivals were anything but sudden and easy. The scenes, photographed by Stefano Giuliano this summer in London and New York City, were created entirely out of paper—with approximately 500 individual sheets of A3, weighing in at a total of 55 lb., used to create each scene. (“My scissors need some serious sharpening after these three covers,” she says.) The slow, meticulous work to build these sets echoes the deliberate effort that our three cover subjects and their fellow TIME100 Next honorees have put into their early careers. “What I really wanted was to celebrate the individual craft each talent brings,” Frost says, “the practice and the bloody hard work most people don’t see.”We launched TIME100 Next in 2019 with the belief that the nature of influence was changing. When the TIME100 was born at the turn of this century, influence largely derived from traditional power structures and timing. We created TIME100 Next knowing that influence can now come early and, when it does, through channels that work outside the establishment. (Among those on that first TIME100 Next: Bad Bunny, Alysa Liu, and Coco Gauff.)This group is committed to taking risks, and with those risks can come great rewards. That includes the likes of health care worker Marie-Roseline Darnycka Belizaire, who takes her life in her hands to combat the spread of infectious disease; CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana, who launched India’s first privately developed rocket successfully into orbit; and singer Conan Gray, who transformed personal trauma into art that helps other people heal.Our team, led by Dan Macsai and Cate Matthews, spent months working with our editorial colleagues around the world, seeking out the individuals who best represent the stories shaping our world. Among the key themes: those working to increase access to education, individuals leading the AI revolution, leaders tackling immigration, and politicians seeking to create a new kind of leadership in their own countries and around the world. We invited members of our TIME100 community, including LeBron James, Matthew McConaughey, and Angeline Murimirwa, to tell us what the impact of this new crop of leaders means to them.Like the covers, putting this together takes time and craft. We hope the result is worth a close look.