This is the 2025 “Great Performers” issue of the New York Times Magazine. Directed by Gail Bichler and designed by Victoria Escobar, Annie Jen, and Jacky Myint, the issue showcases a variable and dynamic use of the Fenul typeface across both print and digital platforms, paired with the magazine’s custom NYT Mag Serif and NYT Mag Sans.

The New York Times Magazine’s “The Voyages” issue 2024, art directed by Gail Bichler and Claudia Isabel Rubín, uses Maria by Threedotstype and NYT Mag Serif as well as some NYT Mag Sans by A2-Type.

It explores the display features of the Maria Connected typeface for all its titles and the index. Carina del Valle Schorske and Molly Young (Perfume story) carefully wrote the stories. Powerful photography by Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Marta Luccisano, Matthew Pillsbury, and Christopher Gregory-Rivera. What a trip!

The 2024 Great Performers issue from the New York Times Magazine features critic Wesley Morris’s picks and honors the weirdest and wildest performances of the year, including “Actors in the Wild”, a photo essay documenting what some of the best actors of the year do during their downtime and an interview by Amy X. Wang.

The issue was directed by Gail Bichler and designed by Annie Jen, Ben Grandgenett and Jacky Myint, showing a dynamic and impactful use of LL Ruder Plakat VIP on both print and digital, together with their custom NYT Mag Serif and NYT Mag Sans.

To mark the 400th anniversary of the first slave ship arriving in the United States, the New York Times Magazine ran a special issue in print and online. The design was managed by Deb Bishop, the Art Director of The New York Times Magazine Labs. The design takes advantage of two of the custom typefaces designed for the magazine by Henrik Kubel of A2-TYPE: NYT Mag Serif and NYT Mag Sans. The setting is also interesting for its unusual use of italic caps with the roman lowercase (the inverse of italics with roman caps).

The paper describes the project and how it came to be:

In August 1619, a ship carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived at a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. The people on board were sold to colonists, marking the beginning of a more than two-century-long institution that would radically alter and continue to inform the identity of a young nation.

This month is the 400th anniversary of that ship’s arrival. To commemorate this historic moment and its legacy, The New York Times Magazine has dedicated an entire issue and special broadsheet section, out this Sunday, to exploring the history of slavery and mapping the ways in which it has touched nearly every aspect of contemporary life in the United States.

The 1619 Project began as an idea pitched by Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of the magazine’s staff writers, during a meeting in January. Her proposal was clear and ambitious: to dedicate an issue of the Sunday magazine to examining the ways the legacy of slavery continues to shape our country. Its implications, particularly for a newspaper that continues to face criticism for its past and present coverage of black Americans, were huge.

Article text is rendered in NYT Imperial, another custom typeface for the New York Times, designed by Matthew Carter based on Edwin W. Shaar’s Imperial (Intertype, 1954).

The cover picture is by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.

The New York Times Magazine’s 2015 Food Issue, art directed by Gail Bichler and Matt Willey used the Helmut typeface for all its titles and the index. In a tour de force, the magazine team managed to mix the three widths of Helmut, while also using stacked ligatures and tiled uppercases, even creating a custom ligature for the cover (‘Lo’). The result is delightful, astonishing and playful … exactly like the food!

This issue has won two Silver Medals at The Society of Publication Designers 51st Annual Awards: one for its cover, the second one for its entire design.

For the 2016 annual Money Issue of The New York Times Magazine, design director Gail Bichler used Proto Grotesk for cover design & interior layout.

In the annual “The Lives They Lived” issue, The New York Times Magazine remembers those we lost in the past year. This year’s edition features the eye-catching Sestra for headlines, combined with Georgia (text) as well as the magazine’s proprietary Sans (captions, by-lines) and Serif (for the summaries in italics).

Designed by Austrian-based Kristina Bartošová, Sestra was initially drawn for a logo of a concept store and subsequently developed into a custom typeface. The design appears to be inspired by Ehmcke-Antiqua a.k.a. Carlton. The online feature uses two weights of Sestra. While the title graphic is embedded as SVG, the headlines are rendered with webfonts, making heavy use of the fonts’ special features — extra-wide alternate capitals and nested ligatures, among other things — activated via the OpenType features Discretionary Ligatures and Stylistic Sets.

Featuring Esperluette, a typeface designed by M l'Atelier (©Hubert Munier & Émilie Rad), France.

“The year’s best big-screen performers in 11 original (very) short films.”

The New York Times Magazine came out with its annual Food & Drink issue this past April. Art director Arem Duplessis put most — if not all — of Euclid BP’s alternates to work throughout the cover and interior. 

The New York TImes Magazine’s June 9, 2013 edition pays tribute to creative innovations, from brunch to the turnstile, and those who created them. It even credits a typeface on the cover: LL Circular. The Stymie is NYT’s custom version that has been used in the magazine for years, and now on the newspaper’s website. 

See the online edition of this issue.

The New York Times Magazine did something new with the online edition of their 2013 Innovations Issue, building a dedicated section of their site for the 48 short essays, with color schemes and type to match the print edition designed by Arem Duplessis.

The typefaces are LL Circular, a new release from Lineto which even gets a mention up front, A2 Beckett for headlines, Georgia for text, and just a dash of the NYT’s custom bold condensed Stymie on the front page. The format isn’t complex, but it feels like a pretty special edition of the magazine due to the unique packaging, navigation, colors, and especially the type. The design also responds quite well to narrow window sizes

I have only two complaints. Some of the color backgrounds are a little too strong for reading, especially when they also include a halftone image like the “Sleep-Away Camp” article below. To counteract this, the designers added a tiny white drop shadow to the text (an increasingly popular practice on the web), but I think this does more harm than good — though the effect is sharper and more distracting in some of these screenshots (shown at reduced size) than as I experienced it in the browser.

The other beef is minor: the right margin is slightly cropped for me (see the comments link at top of all pages), probably because they only tested on a Mac which had the default hidden OS X scrollbars that only appear when scrolling. Oops.

Props for hanging the quote!

I don’t want to read this. That background image is just too intrusive.