The New York Times
It’s 2015 and The New York Times marketing is inconsistent and click-baity. Imagine different styles of CTA buttons, random typefaces, stock photography. There’s no all-encompassing design system for marketing all Times products, instead different systems are siloed within each product team.
I joined as a part of the effort to change this. Beginning with significantly reducing the variations and exploring cleaner design solutions. Once a foundation was set I assisted in art directing photography and illustration to replace stock and contributed in bigger conceptual campaigns.
Ultimately, over the course of 3 years, this work played an important part in developing The Times brand principles guide.
What I worked on:
Cohesive marketing for all NYT products
Cleaning up + creating a design system
Worked from concept to production
Designed for digital + print
Evergreen campaigns + special conceptual campaigns
Art direction for photography + illustration
Directed and photographed my own shoots
Proposed a revised social strategy
Participated in designing a cafe space
Collaborated with internal and external partners
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Photography
Context:
The NYT Brand Marketing team had never before created their own high quality images and instead used stock or newsroom photography for marketing.
How can we frame the NYT products in a more beautiful way and repurpose the images for different use cases? How can we plan to make the images versatile and clean enough for text and different layouts? How can we use props to quickly communicate what product we’re talking about and relate to different target audiences?
Challenges:
I assisted in brainstorming around our team’s needs, planning, researching photographers, maximizing output within budget, and art directing before and during the shoots. For some simple needs, I was the director and photographer. I was appointed to help with photography projects because my team saw I had strong styling abilities. I was not the stylist but worked closely with one.
My Role:
Here is an example of the variety of lifestyle scenes we captured. We also created clean and simple device shots on color backgrounds, some in hand some flat lay, as well as more lifestyle with models.
Here are just a few ways we applied the new photography to our marketing, ie. landing pages, printed mailers, email, and more.
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Design
Systems
The NYT online and in print is a strong, cohesive brand identity, but it fell apart in the form of marketing. There was a critical need to explore and define a consistent way of expressing the brand and all of the products under the NYT umbrella. From banner ads to billboards and everything in between.
Context:
The volume of marketing was so high the creative team could barely keep up as it was. Marketer’s demands and business goals are always most important, so the added challenge of rethinking everything while we were pumping assets out was difficult. When something’s been done a certain way for a long time it’s hard to initially gain trust, get budget, and buy more time to validate creative vision.
How can we keep up with essential tasks and work real time to provide evidence that investing in design, photo and system improvements are worth it?
Challenges:
Here is an example of an early banner ad design system. This simple framework still holds true today in various forms. Their sole purpose is to be eye catching among a busy web page so marketers wanted to keep pushing for loud designs with giant buttons. Part of my job was to argue for simplicity and validate why it will still work just as well if not better. I created hundreds of layouts for all the sizing needs, came up with strong color combinations, and designed variations that could accommodate illustrations and photography.
Sometimes I would create simple illustrations or work with an illustrator. Here are a couple examples of emails and banner ads for a holiday sale.
Emails similarly were previously crowded with newsroom and stock photography as the primary visuals, poorly organized and overloaded information, and loud calls to action. We created clean, modular email templates that could contain and differentiate various types of information in an elegant way. Here’s an example of an email design broken down into modules that would be recycled with different content and colors from our palette.
Various frameworks were created for print ads as well. Again, these needed to work for such a wide range of sizes it was critical to design a system that was flexible. Here are a couple examples from a series I designed in many sizes and with different photos of reporters.
The New York Times really is “the daily miracle.” Sometimes, though, there are awkward gaps in the paper that need filling. Usually this is where ads go but sometimes there’s a need for something else to fill the space. Our team decided to create a flexible, clean, and pleasant NYT filler ad system that can be pulled from in an instant.
I pulled suggested NYT illustrators to work with and created hundreds of layouts for these filler ads. They ranged from the tiniest spot in the paper to half or full pages. Here are just a few.
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Truth
Campaign
The New York Times’ first brand campaign of its scale, based on the concept that the truth is hard to find and to know, but The Times is constantly in pursuit of it.
This campaign came at a time when anti-press rhetoric was on the rise and news organizations, particularly at the local level, were depleting. As a result, we looked to show that no matter the subject, no matter the story, The New York Times chases the truth with rigor and integrity.
Context:
I worked with my team and agency Droga5 to brainstorm around this concept, provide feedback and ideas, and execute large-scale, with many deliverables, on the high-level concept we landed on.
The Truth Has a Voice: An evolution of our “Truth Is Hard” campaign, demonstrating how New York Times investigative journalism gives the truth a voice by bringing otherwise hidden stories to light.
