NYT MAG OLYMPIC FONT*

NYT MAG OLYMPIC FONT* (Type Design)

Every special issue of the NYT mag is opportunity for rejoicing ‒ especially for lovers of beautiful type and editorial design. Art Director of the magazine Matt Willey has very kindly shared with us some spreads for the new Winter Olympics themed issue, out this weekend. The typeface is a collaboration between Matt & long-time collaborator Henrik Kubel ‒ we quizzed Matt about this, and more.

It really came about because of a lack of space. The issue covers all 15 winter olympic sports, from Alpine skiing to speed skating. It’s a lot to fit in, there’s not a huge amount of room to play with. Many of the pages had to accommodate the headline (the name of the sport), the deck, an image and the body text. It wasn’t possible to have traditional openers for many of the pieces. The wide stacked type was a way of giving some scale and typographic presence to those headlines when they ran in the thin columns around all that stuff.

This was the first idea I had. I changed the template on the feature well pages and made all the outer margins smaller, partly (mainly) because I really liked the way it looks but it also allowed us to get more text on the pages.

I worked on it, on and off, for about two and half weeks. A lot of that was just mapping the issue out, blocking out stories, trying to make everything fit. It’s like a puzzle. We had this great mix ‒ I think ‒ of photographically-led pieces and other more literary pieces. Trying to figure out how the pacing of the issue would work took some time. I had a pretty set idea of what I wanted to try and do with the type; a very wide stacking typeface where each character was the exact same width, and I drew a few characters to see how (if!) it might work. My letters were pretty ropey, I was very glad (relieved!) when Henrik agreed to help. He took my crude start and, somehow, made omething brilliant out of it.