The New York Times turns 175 with an identity, events and a campaign — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
For its 175th anniversary, The New York Times created a custom 175 mark and identity system to use across editorial, opinion, advertising, events and marketing. The anniversary programme also included a celebration and exhibition at Spring Studios, plus a social campaign, film series, photojournalism tour of university campuses and an identity for The Times’s NYC Marathon team. Creative Director Jessi Brattengeier led the work alongside The Times’s in-house Culture and Comms Design team and a roster of select partners.
“An anniversary is an easy invitation to look backwards,” Brattengeier explains. The team wanted the 175th celebration to do “something more useful: remind people what original reporting actually takes, and why it’s worth protecting,” with every piece of the work holding “two ideas together – 175 years of history and the urgency of the journalism happening right now.”
Custom marks are rare at The Times, whose own type families handle nearly all of its needs. Typed out in NYT Fraktur, The Times’s blackletter typeface drawn by type designer Ed Benguiat, the numerals felt a bit flat and, next to the wordmark, lacked the dynamism that the celebration needed. So The Times commissioned XYZ Type to draw a custom mark, exploring numerals that ranged from regimented blackletter forms to ornate options with frills and swashes. Co-founder Jesse Ragan found that “the quiet confidence in a plain-spoken blackletter carried The Times’s identity better than fussy details.” Each numeral nods to details of the wordmark without matching them precisely: the ‘1’ echoes the serifs of the ‘h,’ the ‘7’ ends in a calligraphic flick that follows the leg of the ‘k’ and the ‘5’ closes on a tapered arc that refers to the ‘s.’ The aim, Brattengeier notes, was for the mark and the wordmark to feel like “a family resemblance, not a logo placed next to a logo.”
The 175 identity first launched in motion, at the end of The Times’s New Year’s Eve video about the shared history of Times Square and The New York Times. The Times gave XYZ Type and Kiffer Keegan, who worked on the motion, the same brief and had them work together as a team, so the mark and its motion were made at the same time. Once the mark was set, The Times built out lockups that pair it with the wordmark or the standalone ‘T’ – quiet and formal on a printed section, large and graphic on a wall at an event. The identity uses two of The Times’s proprietary typefaces: Franklin for body copy, subheads and information, and Cheltenham Light as the defining typeface of the anniversary. “The lighter weight kept it feeling joyous rather than stoic,” Brattengeier tells us.
The in-house team gave outside partners high-level guidelines with a light touch on the rules, leaving each to decide how much of the identity to use in their own piece. In editorial, the 175 mark’s use “had to be more restrained,” Deputy Editor for Digital News Design Gabriel Gianordoli explains. The mark had to work across different publishing pipelines and formats, and “the elements of The Times identity – colour, type and sometimes even The Times wordmark – are already present in the articles.” So the anniversary’s editorial expression expands on the identity through art direction, in the Eyewitness series of 15 pieces that The Times is publishing during the anniversary rollout. Illustrator and designer Matt Dorfman made collages that reimagine the archive for the series, each pairing at least one photo of the event it portrays with a newspaper tear sheet of the published story.
For the anniversary celebration at Spring Studios, The Times designed the interiors, programming, content and an original exhibition together, working with architectural designer Ingrid Schmaedecke and event production agency Empire Entertainment. A glowing globe light, modelled on the lamps that once hung on the facade of the former New York Times Annex, was set into the venue’s exterior. Inside, the exhibition was the entry point to the night, curated so that history and the present sat side by side. Its objects included a press patch from The Times’s Iraq bureau and a Pulitzer Prize medal for public service. The cases and walls were set out in a staggered arrangement, opening up views through the space. “I was interested in immersion as a collective experience: across the room, you could see other people absorbed in the exhibition while experiencing it yourself,” Schmaedecke reflects. Since the celebration, the exhibition has moved to the lobby of The Times’s headquarters, on view until the end of 2026.
In the main event room at Spring Studios, hanging vertical screens played artists’ interpretations of the ‘T,’ commissioned for T Magazine more than 20 years ago, in place of a static logo. Times journalist Michael Barbaro hosted the evening, with surprise vignettes from actors Jeremy Strong, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Regina King among others, and a performance from singer Janelle Monáe. The soundtrack for the night and the anniversary’s brand videos started from a question that in-house composer Dan Powell asked: “What do we physically have here in the building that we could record?” With fellow composer Pat McCusker, Powell recorded Royal and Remington typewriters, IBM Wheelwriters and falling linotype sourced from the archive and turned them into the score, including for the film that The Times made with Keegan tracing how its brand has evolved.
With Studio Dumbar, The Times made ‘Reporters Follow the Facts,’ a social campaign built on the idea that original reporting is essential and getting rarer. It honours every journalist doing original reporting, at The Times and elsewhere. Its centrepiece film moves through The Times’s reporting from the Pentagon Papers to Covid to #MeToo and draws on never-before-seen images from the archive, among them on-the-ground contact sheets from 9/11. At Metrograph, ‘Stop the Presses,’ a film series designed with Pentagram partner and former NYT Art Director Matt Willey, pairs five classic films about journalism with conversations featuring Times journalists. The New York Stock Exchange’s screens showed archival photos of The Times’s Wall Street coverage paired with the 175 identity. Internally, Brattengeier’s team worked with The Times’s Print Desk, led by Andrew Sondern and Keith Webb, on a special print section set with the name of every employee at the time of printing. At the NYC Marathon, Times Runners will wear 175 Marathon identity gear designed in-house as they raise money through Run for Reporting for the free-tuition campaign at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
‘Bearing Witness,’ the photojournalism tour that travels to university campuses, was curated by The Times’s Director of Photography, Meaghan Looram, and designed with Other Means around a custom delivery truck, which serves as a backdrop and title wall and turns into a screening room for behind-the-scenes footage. “It was important to acknowledge that even though most readers get their paper on a screen, for most of The Times’s 175-year history, delivering the news meant fleets of trucks dropping stacks of newspapers at newsstands around the world,” adds Other Means’ Co-founder Gary Fogelson.
“What held all of the work together was less a rulebook than a shared way of using our history: as evidence of character, not as a style,” Brattengeier concludes. “Across 175 years, the one constant has been innovation, anchored by values that haven’t changed.”