The New Yorker’s Creative Director explains how the magazine is designed

Whether your magazine has been around for one month or one hundred years, you're going to have to deal with boundaries. In this excerpt from the D&AD Festival talk Opposite ends of the publishing world, Nicholas Blechman, Creative Director at The New Yorker and Ariane Spanier, of Ariane Spanier Design, talk to MagCulture’s Jeremy Leslie about the differences in designing one of the world’s most famous legacy titles versus designing FUKT magazine, an innovative art title. 

Key to this discussion is creative freedom: how do you innovate despite the limits placed on you by convention, finances or time? In this discussion, Spanier, Creative Director of FUKT magazine, talks about how some of the self-imposed boundaries of the magazine  — publishing once a year, never putting illustrations on the front cover  — can end up provoking a new type of innovation. For Blechman, the boundaries inherent in making The New Yorker, such as its weekly publishing schedule and intense fact-checking process, are an unchangeable part of its DNA. The pair also discuss what it means to have the freedom to make mistakes, work with new talent and be unanswerable to a client brief.

Watch more highlights from D&AD Festival talks here.