A Century of the New Yorker
We worked with the New York Public Library on an exhibition commemorating 100 years of the New Yorker magazine. The Public Library holds the New Yorker’s archive: letters between editors and authors, artwork, edited manuscripts, and hundreds of issues. The 5th avenue location gets a huge number of visitors, but has a challenging layout: two long corridors leading off of the iconic McGraw rotunda. We embraced the challenge of visually connecting the corridors by wrapping the entrances with the New Yorker logo letters — a nod to the classic New Yorker tote bag you see throughout the city.
For the logo we worked with the creative director of the New Yorker, Nicholas Blechman, and the illustrator Luci Gutiérrez, to create a drawing of the classic New Yorker mascot, Eustace Tilley, standing back-to-back, with a contemporary Eustace. The older Eustace was placed at the top of the introduction to the first half of the exhibition and the new figure sat atop the intro in the more contemporary wing. Luci also drew separate standing figures that we used to create person-scaled wayfinding in the library rotunda.
Encircling the entire galleries, are a frieze of over 400 covers. These work as a implicit timeline, highlighting current events as well as the timelessness of the magazine. The section texts were placed on panels and paired with classic New Yorker line drawing illustrations.
