Almost everything about The New Yorker’s identity was set in its first year — and it has resisted change ever since.

The New Yorker launched in 1925, founded by editor Harold Ross and his wife, journalist Jane Grant (with backer Raoul Fleischmann). From the start it looked elegant, witty and a little aloof — a magazine for a sophisticated urban reader. What’s remarkable is the continuity: the masthead lettering, the cover conventions and the black-and-white restraint have stayed essentially intact for a century. In a media world that reinvents itself constantly, The New Yorker treats its refusal to modernise as the brand — and it reads as timeless rather than dated.

The single most valuable design asset is a typeface one man drew for the launch — and it’s named after him.

The magazine’s first art editor, Rea Irvin, drew the distinctive nameplate and display lettering in 1925; the face is literally called “Irvin” after him (he adapted it from an alphabet by the etcher Allen Lewis). Thin-and-thick, slightly art-deco, unmistakably elegant, it served as the magazine’s display type for 88 years almost unchanged. In the 2013 redesign — the first big one in over a decade — Irvin was carefully redrawn/digitised for modern platforms, joined by Neutraface for hierarchy. It’s a masterclass in stewardship: modernise the files, never the character.

The brand has a mascot — a top-hatted dandy squinting at a butterfly through a monocle.

On the very first cover, dated 21 February 1925, Rea Irvin drew a monocled dandy inspecting a butterfly (modelled on a 19th-century caricature of the fashionable Count d’Orsay). The figure wasn’t named at the time; the writer Corey Ford later christened him “Eustace Tilley.” He has reappeared on or around the magazine’s anniversary issue nearly every February since — a rare example of a single illustration becoming a permanent brand character. He is also firmly protected IP, which is why our homage above deliberately contains no Tilley and no monocle.

The identity owns no colour — the covers supply all of it. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

The New Yorker’s brand is black on white: the Irvin masthead is black, body text runs in Adobe Caslon, and there’s no signature brand hue at all (the magazine doesn’t publish an official brand colour). All the colour lives in the illustrated covers, which are the real canvas — a deliberate division of labour where the identity stays quiet so the art can be loud. It’s the same lesson Sony and HBO teach: a disciplined monochrome frame can be the most confident choice of all. The greyscale below is illustrative, not a spec.

No account of the brand is complete without its other signature art form — the single-panel cartoon.

Alongside the Irvin masthead and the illustrated covers, the cartoons are the third pillar of The New Yorker’s visual identity — and arguably the most beloved. Since 1925 the magazine has run single-panel gag cartoons, a form it did more than any other publication to define, from Peter Arno’s bold brushwork to the deadpan absurdism of later decades. They are as much a part of the reading rhythm as the prose, and the magazine has carried cartoons on nearly every page-turn for a century, becoming the medium’s most prestigious home.

Their power is inseparable from the design around them. Set in generous white space, framed by the elegant Caslon body type and the strict black-and-white palette, each drawing is given room to breathe — the restraint of the identity is precisely what lets the art land. The caption contest on the back page turned readers into collaborators and became a franchise of its own. It is the same division of labour that governs the covers: the identity stays quiet and monochrome, so that the pictures — witty, hand-drawn, unmistakably of this magazine — can carry the personality.

Keep The New Yorker’s system on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.