How The Atlantic turned 169 years of print into a festival identity — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

For the 2026 Atlantic Festival, The Atlantic’s in-house design team went into its archive room in the New York City office, where it found borders, section dividers and mastheads, along with decorative elements like seashells, seahorses, mermaids and tridents – ornaments that have supported the magazine’s pages since 1857. The team scoured every edition of the magazine for fragments that it could take apart, recombine, redraw, transform and push somewhere else. It set itself a question: how do we make 169 years of design history feel alive while capturing the energy of a live event?

Everything that the team found was photographed and scanned, then rebuilt through image trace to work as vector shapes, with adjustments where they were needed. A fragment scales from a small asset up to a backdrop or a stage screen. “The question that took us the longest to settle was how ‘clean’ to make them,” explains Design Director Laura Scofield. “With the tools available now, it’s tempting to smooth a 200-year-old woodcut into a crisp vector, but what you lose is exactly what gives it personality. The wobble in a border. The places where the ink didn’t take. We argued about it a lot, and in the end, we kept the irregularities and let the translation to digital stay visibly imperfect.”

“The layouts are composites assembled via fragments, a real montage of heterogeneous times,” Scofield details. “Visual elements of our history that had never shared a page before are suddenly presented together.” The one reference from outside the archive was “the Verbasizer – the app David Bowie built with Ty Roberts in the mid-nineties to automate the cut-up technique he’d been using to write songs for decades.” They also considered an AI randomiser that would have assembled the ornaments into layouts, but decided against it so the team could keep experimenting on its own terms.

The typefaces are native to the magazine’s identity system. Garamond is the workhorse – a humanist serif with a long history in print that makes The Atlantic’s platforms feel writerly. It is used for body copy across every surface. “Atlantic Condensed is our display typeface. The high contrast of its serifs brings authority and elegance to our pages,” explains VP & Executive Creative Director Drew Campbell.

“The Poseidon emblem was created by W. A. Dwiggins and has served as the colophon of The Atlantic since 1946," Campbell details. “We now use it less as a colophon per se and more as a way to add visual interest across our surfaces. To us it’s a signifier of the magazine’s legacy.” Dwiggins’ oval engraving sits between New York City and the September dates on the primary lockup, and each masthead comes in a stacked and a horizontal version. A second mark, an oval ‘A’ medallion drawn in a style close to the Poseidon, is used in its place across some of the lockups, which gave the team a larger set of symbols to work with. The ‘A’ also shows up on its own, at scale. “The A is our primary, declarative logomark, and its composition harkens back to the classical roots of the magazine, acting as a unifying logo across all platforms,” Campbell adds.

“Every piece is a different collage, but they’re all collages of the same material, made the same way,” Scofield explains. “The ornaments, mastheads and colours change; the attitude toward them doesn’t. Underneath that we set rules to hold the whole thing together. Borders are treated as monumental graphic devices – exaggerated, bled into, with elements enlarged or cropped against them. Compositions should feel asymmetric, never mirrored. And type and graphic elements are always pure black, so however much colour we bring to the background, the marks themselves stay consistent.”

Art Director Devin Rochford resurfaced other work by Dwiggins while researching the Poseidon, finding inspiration for the colour palette in his stencil-like decoration for The Travels of Marco Polo in 1933 and the spine labels that he designed for the Limited Editions Club edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel in 1936. “From there we pushed toward high contrast, like the orange and yellow, which gave us an interesting balance: very bright, digital colours behind centuries-old ornaments,” Campbell notes.

For the animated elements, The Atlantic handed Mallandrich its full archive and some initial static layouts. The Barcelona-based motion practice answered with a wave parallax, staggering the layers so the archive elements move with the back-and-forth of the ocean. The ink bleeds are made natively in After Effects, each reveal following the contour of the artwork rather than spreading as a plain mask. The two teams refined the motion together under The Atlantic’s creative direction. “The Atlantic team can replicate this easily by just controlling a single layer instead of animating dozens of them,” Gerard Mallandrich, Founder and Creative Director explains of the staggered layers that the archive elements sit on. “Like real waves, they never stop and are always in motion,” he concludes.