— Rea Irvin

All typefaces have personalities, but few say “dandy” as confidently as the one on the cover of The New Yorker.

Inside, it does a modest dance as display type in black, red, or blue, and heralds the magazine’s website. You don’t have to be a typophile to spot that face, the DNA of a logotype that’s inextricable from the publication itself.

Irvin drew this reflective portrait of an artist in 1951, near the end of his tenure on staff at The New Yorker.

Through more than 80 years of the magazine’s visual evolution and increasing seriousness of purpose—and into the digital age—the lettering remains.

Two pages from The Smythes, the comic strip Irvin drew from 1930 to 1936.

Cover and frontispiece from a 1923 book of humorous opera poems; throughout its evolution, the type has had no lower-case, although exceptions are made for the small c in “Mc” and “Mac.”

Rea Irvin, whom founding editor Harold Ross hand-picked as the magazine’s “art consultant,” introduced the letters now known as “Irvin type” to the magazine-reading public in 1925, along with the essential design that still graces newsstands. A truly modern bon vivant, Irvin (1881–1972) was also a keen appreciator of the century of his birth. His high regard for both the careful artistry of the past and the gleam of the modern metropolis shines from the very first issue of the magazine, for which Irvin adapted the lettering from an alphabet drawn by Allen Lewis, an American etcher and woodcutter trained in Paris.

Eighty-three years after Harold Ross launched the magazine, that typography stands strong. The magazine’s current art editor, Françoise Mouly, pinpoints its necessity: “The minute you put the logo on it, it becomes a New Yorker cover. It’s genuinely a typeface of its era, and it’s also clear enough so that it can transcend that.” Irvin and Ross established that formula with the very first cover, for which Irvin created “Eustace Tilley,” the high-hatted critic who also presides over the Talk of the Town section and has appeared on the cover of nearly every anniversary issue since. The daring of this anachronistic mascot was a triumphant sign that ’20s magazine readers were in for something as deeply formal and passionately unpredictable as jazz.

An illustrated travelogue published in 1915 features lettering and drawings by master etcher and wood cutter Allen Lewis, whose work Irvin admired.

Three of Irvin’s Life covers, including the 1920 Movie Number (top) and the 1919 Gloom Number (right).
The two swimmers pictured in the 1930 cover at left strongly suggest Eustace Tilley and his butterfly; the configuration reappeared in Irvin’s drawings many times over his lifetime.

Irvin drew Eustace Tilley at the last minute to replace a hackneyed image of theater curtains revealing the Manhattan skyline.
As de facto art director and a senior man on staff, Irvin contributed his serene and wisdom and humor, as well as his connections to many of the best magazine artists of the day. As scholar Judith Yaross Lee has noted, he also helped define the “New Yorker cartoon” itself. Not least, Irvin drew 169 covers of his own, as well as illustrations, department headings, caricatures, and cartoons.
Irvin’s drawings show off his highly developed sense of narrative drama within the box of a cartoon or cover. His New Yorker obituary said of his drawing style that “it had the quality of Chinese calligraphy, though with a Western boldness of color.”

Irvin left other enduring inventions in the magazine’s page design, too. His elegant wavy rules, for example, keep the text central with a flourish straight from his cartoons; the vertical “cover strap” he devised for the margin can reflect the cover’s theme in subtly expressive ways.
Despite his pivotal role in defining The New Yorker in its earliest years, Irvin has not garnered the attention given to his editorial counterparts, and much of his life and work remain a mystery. Still, it’s easy to see why Ross, who declared at the outset that the magazine would be a “reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life,” sought him for the job.
Ross—who, like Irvin, was known to crave both adventure and order—was a true student of contemporary magazines, and a great deal of research into publication design preceded even the first mock-up.
Irvin had been art editor at Life, and Ross trusted his taste, which—as others have noted—in turn shaped his own. Ross biographer Dale Kramer describes his influence: “[Irvin] had a quick, accurate eye for good craftsmanship. More important, he knew what changes were necessary to make mediocre work passable and passable work better.” Born in San Francisco, Irvin had worked as a newspaper illustrator, stage and screen actor, comic strip artist, and piano player before arriving at Life. Irvin’s diversity of aesthetic experience was as essential to his invention of The New Yorker’s visual style as Ross’s vagabond generalism was to his conception of the subject matter.

Irvin drew Eustace Tilley at the last minute to replace a hackneyed image of theater curtains revealing the Manhattan skyline.

Irvin’s grand swoops made even his heaviest men and women into weightless, ultramodern balloons.

One of Irvin’s forays into Art Deco shows the lightness of his visual comedy: The smoke rings end in the logotype’s O.

He drew many covers during World War II. The vertical “cover strap” (here on the left-hand margin, and illustrated to reflect the theme) was one of his innovations.

There was nothing offhand about the editors’ choice of lettering for the cover. (Type consultant Elmer Davis suggested Caslon for the body typeface; it turned out to be the perfect complement.) Irvin had been impressed by the lettering style he discovered in the work of Allen Lewis, years before he adapted it for The New Yorker. A version of it appears as early as 1923 on Irvin’s cover and frontispiece for Newman Levy’s Opera Guyed, which retells classic operas in comic verse. We may never know when Irvin first encountered Lewis’s agile letters, but a 1958 memo in the New York Public Library’s New Yorker records provides a clue that Irvin spotted them in a book published in 1915.

In the memo, then–New Yorker staffer F. S. Norman wrote: “[Irvin] said he saw Allen’s pamphlet ‘Journeys To Bagdad’ which was drawn to simulate a woodcut, and he liked it so well he took up the question of Lewis’ creating the entire alphabet but that Lewis was not interested and suggested that Irvin go ahead with it which he did. Many of the letters are quite similar to the Modern Roman capital letters done by Will Bradley as shown in the book ‘Letters & Lettering’ pub 1921, Frank Chonteau [sic] Brown. … Many of the letters we have [also] found on illustrations of old European tombstones & on many of the old Playbills where wood type is used.”
Each chapter of Allen’s travelogue begins with a more idiosyncratic, but recognizable, forebear to what eventually became New Yorker type. By then, Irvin had the experience to draw display type at this level—and the confidence to play with it, too. By making the face his own and placing it in an ambitiously sophisticated context, Irvin gave the old tools a modern gloss. At the same time, the typeface acts as a window to a noble past: The love and dedication that master craftsmen like Lewis gave their woodcuts, bookplates, etchings, and engravings has permanent representation on the 21st-century newsstand.

Fascinated by Japanese scroll-painting styles, Irvin sometimes drew his signature in the shape of a traditional seal stamp.

Irvin’s covers could be equally dramatic with lush or minimal detail, a full or limited palette.

He delighted in pushing white space as far as it would go, and in lavishing special attention on corners in which few might linger.

Soon, the logotype became so familiar that Irvin and his fellow cover artists could overlap and toy with it. Here, the ridge along the dragon’s neck spells “Income Tax”; his tail spells “Surtax.”

Meanwhile, Irvin’s two most famous creations have had considerable adventures outside The New Yorker’s pages. Satirical riffs on the Eustace Tilley image flourish, from a 1957 Mad cover to a New Pornographers poster to a recent Flickr contest sponsored by the magazine itself. The type, for its part, isn’t parodied so much as it is copied and pasted. As Ben Yagoda writes in his history of the magazine, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, “With the widespread adoption of computer typesetting in the 1980s, Irvin type, with minuscule variations, became available to any designer who wanted to suggest, however improbably, a product’s upscale urbanity.” He cites its appearance on, for instance, an Alice Munro book cover, and in ads for Bergdorf Goodman and the Cadillac Catera. Recent sightings include Everybody Loves Raymond DVDs, Sara Lee bread, Jane magazine web ads, and the book cover of a ribald political satire by performance artist Karen Finley.

Digital knockoffs of the famous face (including a QuadGraphics ad in a 1984 issue of PRINT) make for a handy shortcut for declaring good taste—or the twitting of it.

Three incarnations of the Talk of the Town design, from Irvin’s 1925 logo (top left), to a 1936 layout (right), to the current version.

A recent example of the digitized Irvin type; note the wavy rule above the department heading. In the early days, Irvin drew many such lines until he and Ross found one they liked best.

With time, editorial successions, and new technology, the primary type shifts, too. For instance, in The Art of The New Yorker, former art editor Lee Lorenz writes, of a late-’70s redesign, “The Irvin alphabet that we had used for headings was redrawn (the originals were lost, and over the years the metal plates had cracked and worn). … The resulting changes, though significant when examined closely, were never commented on by our readers, our contributors, or the press.”
That seems to have been the case through most of the tweaks, cleanups, and redistributions of Irvin’s work over the years. It is the triumph of a design perfectly suited to its content from the first issue, yet flexible enough to adjust with the material. Irvin’s lasting touches definethe spirit and the tone of the magazine and give the whole enterprise provenance and permanence. As a current style guide directs: “The New Yorker logo is different than just typing out the letters in the Irvin font. It should always look as originally designed, and should not be stretched, skewed or condensed in any way.”
The New Yorker founders’ talent and drive alone surely would have sustained the magazine for years. But it was Irvin’s own intimacy with classic form and craft, and his genial willingness to share that expertise, that allowed him to create a complete device: a design, a typeface, a style, and a mood that would be instantly recognizable, and eminently effective, almost a century later.
Many thanks to Pat Keogh, Michael Maslin, Jon Michaud, Paul Morris, and Erin Overbey for their assistance.

Typography Specimens

This document exists to study the various typographic implementations and variations of the typefaces used, and those that are under consideration for use, on newyorker.com. Our goal is to create a standard metric by which to judge the quality, legibility, features, and other properties of each embedded typeface. Furthermore, experimentation and testing are made easier without impacting the rest of the site.

NewYorker.com 2016

The current iteration of the website uses a combination of specialized (and occasionally inaccurate) fonts, mostly loaded from Adobe’s Typekit. Below are examples of each used throughout the site.

• Irvin Display

  55px. Used on The Latest, Current Issue overview, Related Stories, Daily Cartoon
  Look at all of the doodads

• Irvin Display Rounder

  55px. Also known as NY Irvin Display DE. Variant of Irvin Display with fewer ligatures and word replacements.
  Look at how fewer doodads there are

• Irvin Heading

  38px. Used on post titles.
  A Tasteful Page Title

• Irvin Text

  12px. This variant appears to be used exclusively for rubrics. It's slightly heavier than Irvin Heading and less angular.
  From the rubric name dept.

• Adobe Caslon (Regular, Bold, Italic & Bold Italic)

  18px, 150% line-height. Another distinctive typeface sourced from print. We load four versions: regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic. Originally designed in the 18th century, Adobe has added many digital features to it as of 1990 (More information can be found here). The version we currently use online does not contain many of the typographic changes that the magazine has made for legibility reasons, such as the removal of certain ligatures.
  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed est turpis, lobortis sagittis iaculis sed, tristique eu turpis. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Integer auctor nunc id purus semper ultrices. Integer euismod augue ac commodo facilisis. Aliquam efficitur bibendum ligula. Pellentesque vitae interdum leo, eget gravida felis. Nullam in convallis magna, nec scelerisque nisi. Curabitur gravida feugiat purus nec egestas. Ut dapibus sapien tortor. In placerat ipsum velit, non accumsan dolor dignissim id.

• Georgia

  18px, 150% line-height. Georgia is a default font for virtually every device, so including it has a page weight advantage. However, italic and bold versions were deemed unpalatable (especially at larger sizes), so this never served as a full replacement for Caslon on newer templates.
  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed est turpis, lobortis sagittis iaculis sed, tristique eu turpis. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Integer auctor nunc id purus semper ultrices. Integer euismod augue ac commodo facilisis. Aliquam efficitur bibendum ligula. Pellentesque vitae interdum leo, eget gravida felis. Nullam in convallis magna, nec scelerisque nisi. Curabitur gravida feugiat purus nec egestas. Ut dapibus sapien tortor. In placerat ipsum velit, non accumsan dolor dignissim id.

• Neutra Regular

  14px. Neutra has many uses throughout the site; including bylines, links, and low-hierarchy titles. As far as I can tell, we only use this weight of Neutra for certain link copy.
  A Tiny Link »

• Neutra Demi

  20px. Generally speaking, the regular weight used for headings & titles at lower visual hierarchies.
  Sometimes, Page Titles Do Not Need to be Overly Emphasized

• Neutra Bold

  20px. Used for primary navigation links and bylines.
  By Firstnäme St Lástnàme

Proposed

The print version of The New Yorker has differing choices for many use cases. For ones that are the same (such as Caslon), we are using outdated equivalents on newyorker.com. Below, we have manually converted original print fonts to WOFF, to ensure maximum parity for tracking, ligatures, hinting, etc. We also aim to eventually move away from TypeKit hosting for performance reasons.

• Irvin Display (New)

  55px. Suggested replacement for current. This is what the magazine uses.
  Look at all of the doodads (None. No doodads)

• Irvin Heading (Updated)

  38px. Not much has changed.
  A Tasteful Page Title

• Irvin Text (Updated)

  12px. Not much has changed.
  From the Rubric Name Dept.

• Adobe Caslon (Regular, Bold, Italic & Bold Italic) (Updated)

  18px, 150% line-height. Ligatures and hinting have been slightly changed to match print.
  

  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed est turpis, lobortis sagittis iaculis sed, tristique eu turpis. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Integer auctor nunc id purus semper ultrices. Integer euismod augue ac commodo facilisis. Aliquam efficitur bibendum ligula. Pellentesque vitae interdum leo, eget gravida felis. Nullam in convallis magna, nec scelerisque nisi. Curabitur gravida feugiat purus nec egestas. Ut dapibus sapien tortor. In placerat ipsum velit, non accumsan dolor dignissim id.

• Neutra Regular (Updated)

  14px. Very similar.
  A Tiny Link »

• Neutra Demi (Updated)

  20px. Slightly more accurate hinting means that this weight is noticably thinner & crisper.
  Sometimes, Page Titles Do Not Need to be Overly Emphasized

• Neutra Bold (Updated)

  20px. Very similar.
  By Firstnäme St Lástnàme

TypeKit vs Self-hosting fonts

Why do we want to move away from TypeKit? What's so bad about it?

• Loads all fonts at once, regardless of use on the page.
• Loads two external files at begining of page render, blocking other assets from loading.
• Not subset (we use only a fraction of the characters & features included in the original files).
• Our site appearance is tied to TypeKit—if it goes down like last week, so do our fonts.

What's so great about self-hosting?

• Fonts are loaded on-demand—if the user has not encountered Caslon Bold-Italic on the page yet, for example, this font will not load.
• All files are loaded from our own server, which does not block other asset requests.
• We have direct control over subsetting and compression. This results in much smaller files (sometimes around 50% smaller than TypeKit).
• First-party hosting means that we never have to worry about what is happening with Adobe's servers.

Whom else at Condé Nast has taken the time & effort to do this?

• Pitchfork
• GQ
• Vanity Fair
• Vogue
• Bon Appétit
• W Magazine
• Condé Nast Traveler
• Ars Technica
• Teen Vogue

Who has not?

• Wired
• Architectural Digest

And before you ask—yes, the New York Times self-hosts their own fonts.