In Praise of Slow Design: an article about the New Yorker’s nearly-unchanging design.

Many of the magazine’s most idiosyncratic conventions bespoke an almost neurotic reticence. For 45 years, The New Yorker had no table of contents. Ross’s successor William Shawn introduced them without comment in 1969. Until the October 5, 1992, issue, bylines were placed unobtrusively at the end of articles, when they appeared at all, almost as an afterthought. “Regular readers of The New Yorker will note in this issue a number of changes in the magazine’s format and design,” warned the magazine’s fourth editor, Tina Brown, and beginning with that issue, bylines finally appeared beneath the headlines. In the following months, le deluge: Brown would introduce brief article summaries (a.k.a. “decks”) and photography to the interior, bringing in Richard Avedon, Gilles Peress and Robert Polidori as regulars. The incorporation of these features — a table of contents, bylines, photographs — utterly commonplace in nearly every other general interest magazine on earth, were each regarded as a revolutionary, even shocking, innovation within the pages of The New Yorker. Nonetheless, a comparision of that first issue to the one that arrived in my mailbox last week reveals more similarities than differences.