TIME’s strongest design asset isn’t its logo — it’s a rectangle of red around the edge of every cover.

Founded in 1923 by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, TIME added the design device that would define it on the cover of 3 January 1927: a red border framing the whole page (earlier issues had tried green and orange first). That frame turned the magazine into an instantly recognisable object on any newsstand — it says “the week’s most important story is inside this rectangle” before you read a word. It has been altered only a handful of times in nearly a century — famously going black after 9/11 and green for Earth Day — which is exactly why those exceptions carried such weight.

The bold red “TIME” everyone pictures is younger than the border — the logo spent decades in black.

The nameplate is a custom serif — a classical, Roman-inspired letterform, hand-drawn rather than set in an off-the-shelf font. For its first ~50 years it was black; the switch to the familiar red, with thicker strokes, came around 1972. Together, the red wordmark and the red border make TIME a rare case where a single colour does nearly all the branding. The magazine’s other signature is editorial, not graphic: the “Person of the Year” franchise, running since the 1927 selection of Charles Lindbergh — proof that a cover can be a brand asset as powerful as any mark.

One decisive red, on white, with black type — and no official number for it. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

TIME runs on red, white and black — that’s the whole system. The honest caveat: TIME doesn’t publish an official brand hex, and the reconstructions online disagree, clustering around a bright pigment red like #E90606 or #ED1C24. So treat any “TIME Red” as approximate, not a spec. What matters is the discipline: a near-monochrome palette where a single saturated red frames everything and lets the cover image do the rest. Copy the working values below.

From masthead to body copy, TIME reads in serifs cut specifically for the magazine.

The masthead’s Roman serif is proprietary custom lettering, not a licensable font. Under the surface, TIME’s reading experience runs on bespoke type too: since 2015, the print body text has been set in “Haffner,” a custom serif commissioned from typographer Kent Lew. The choice of serifs throughout is deliberate — they read as authority and permanence, exactly the tone a century-old newsweekly wants. The specimen below is set in a comparable high-contrast serif.

The border’s discipline is what gives TIME’s rare exceptions their punch — none more than the red X.

Because the red frame is so fixed, the handful of times TIME has broken or overprinted it carry enormous weight. The most striking is the red X: on 7 May 1945 the magazine slashed a bold X across Adolf Hitler’s face to mark the end of the Third Reich, then revived the device across the decades for Saddam Hussein, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and, in 2011, Osama bin Laden. One graphic gesture, instantly legible, says “this figure is finished” without a word of cover copy.

The border has bent for other moments too — turning black after the September 11 attacks and green for an Earth Day issue — and each exception works precisely because the rule is otherwise absolute. That is the deeper lesson of TIME’s design: a constraint held for nearly a century becomes a language, so that altering it even slightly reads as a statement of historic importance. The red frame and the red X are two sides of the same idea — a brand so disciplined that both its restraint and its rare departures mean something. Few identities have turned a single rectangle into such a reliable instrument of editorial voice.

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