Decoding Tomorrow: A Visual Analysis of The Economist ’s “The World Ahead 2025” Cover

This study examines The Economist’s “The World Ahead 2025” cover as a case of multimodal visual forecasting, where editorial intent is encoded not just in text but through symbolic imagery, spatial arrangements, and compositional grammar. By integrating computational image analysis and multimodal discourse theory, the research uncovers how the cover constructs a predictive narrative that places Donald Trump's return to power at the center of anticipated global developments. Through a mixed-methods framework, we identify patterns of symbolic dominance, spatial hierarchies, and thematic clustering that reveal implicit editorial priorities concerning politics, economy, technology, security, and climate. The circular visual structure functions not only as a metaphor for global interconnectedness but also as a visual argument that asserts causal relationships between domains of concern. In doing so, the study contributes to scholarship on visual rhetoric, agenda-setting, and political futurism by offering a replicable methodology for decoding complex visual forecasts in editorial design.