When was the new yorker started

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The same typeface — Caslon — was retained but in a larger point size; by condensing the characters and reducing the letter spacing, the lines could still contain the same amount of text. As well as making for easier reading, this produced more solid-looking columns that gave the pages a clearer structure. As for the quotes within the articles, a smaller point size of the same Caslon font was used.

The overall feel of the magazine however remained the same. The listings. As a typographer, I know from experience how difficult listings are. Different levels of subheads are necessary to show the hierarchy between all the sections and to give visual clarification to all the places, dates, times, titles, directors, years and starting times, as well as the descriptions of the listed events.

This was designed by Rea Irvin, or based on letters drawn by him. To my knowledge, it has no name, so let us call it The New Yorker. A warning from The Type Police One of the less satisfactory changes affected the logotype on the cover: in the early s the contours of the letters were smoothed up and their edges sharpened.

The very same typeface — by Irvin — is also used inside, for the headlines, where it retains its original rough contours and rounded corners, which is probably the way Irvin drew it. But it was still a pleasure to see the cover of The New Yorker , which must look entirely at home in those beautifully cared-for Manhattan interiors.

In that city, they know how to present themselves, even magazines of such an age. Yet in the past few years, another thing began to bother me. In I sent them a fax as follows:. The New Yorker is one of my favourite magazines to read and to look at. Not just for the illustrations, but also for the well taken-care-of typography.

In addition to them there is a fourth face, Souvenir by Mr Benquiat. It is only used for two short lines — the date and the price — on your great covers. The reader of The New Yorker will never see this typeface again in the inside. And I [and that is the Type Police] would have been fine with it if the face was a nice one, an addition to your magazine. However, right now your covers, made strong by the typography of the title and the commissioned illustrations, are bothered by these two small typographic warts.

Chris H. Souvenir is the fifth — not fourth, as stated in my fax — typeface and, as previously mentioned, used only for those two small lines on the cover. This original Souvenir had been used on the covers of The New Yorker from the start, but for the purpose of photosetting the font was entirely redrawn by Mr Benquiat in the early s.

The letterforms were cleaned up and the original spice disappeared, though it still had a flavour of what made his Benquiat Frisky such a great face. But his treatment gave the Souvenir another feel and it was that version that appeared on the cover in the early s. Despite my fax, there was no progress for two years, although I continued to read the magazine with the same joy. In , without being asked, I sent in some typographic proposals for the date and the price, set in great typefaces all designed by fine Americans, from Muller Benton to Frere-Jones.

This time there was no answer. But on the cover of the 13 March issue, Souvenir had gone, replaced by the same typeface Irvin had once drawn for the logotype. Was it the Type Police who had done this? The inside had been restyled as well. The magazine had given itself a sort of birthday present. The problem with this present was that the magazine, like a lady who had received too radical a face-lift, no longer looked like itself.

To illustrate this point I will address the six most harmful typographic misdemeanors. Six counts against The New Yorker 1. The type on the cover. I am glad that the Souvenir has gone, but using the same font for the dateline and the name of the magazine dilutes the impact of the logotype. Typographic contrast should be generated by using at least two different typefaces: this is common sense. Art Deco versus Modernist.

There is nothing wrong with Modernism, but applying a Modernist approach to the layout of magazine constructed along the rules of horror vacui generates new conflicts. For instance, there is now emptiness to fear in the table of contents, with its fields of white space. The magazine also occasionally runs short articles set ragged right among the normal justified columns.

A similar mix of the symmetrical and the asymmetrical is seen in the heads and subheads, which are now treated in two ways: either centred or left-justified. All of which gives a feeling of doubt to the layout. As they are, both buildings are refined pieces of their own time. After the face-lift, some of the subheads and lines in the listings were highlighted in colour, blue and red, mostly.

I wonder why. A good typographer can work with only one colour, black.