A conversation with The New York Times’ Chief Creative Officer, Tom Bodkin

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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT MOUNTAIN GAZETTE, COMMERCIAL TYPE, AND LANE PRESS

For over 44 years Tom Bodkin has been the heart and soul of design at The New York Times. His job titles have included: art director, designer, design director, creative director, chief creative officer, associate managing editor, and deputy managing editor. Tom is only the second art department head to have ever been listed on the prestigious Times masthead. Tom served under more executive editors than I can count … a feat in itself.

There’s not enough podcast to detail the significance of his contribution to the Times—and to the newspaper business at large. Print and digital.

Building on the foundation of news design initiated by his predecessor, Lou Silverstein, Tom pushed major initiatives—from the change of typography and type style, to the introduction of color, to the addition of feature and news sections. He shepherded the transitions from print-only to digital-first platforms. He also took active roles in the transformative redesigns of the Travel, Arts & Leisure, and Sports Daily sections, among others.

His influence extended to overseeing the makeup desk in the newsroom, enlarging the information graphics group and he created some of the most memorable A1 pages ever, including the arrival of a new millennium in 2000, the 9/11 attacks, Barack Obama elected as our first black president, and the ongoing coverage of the COVID pandemic.

He’s also overseen a huge expansion of the paper’s design footprint from around 50 when he started to over 300 people now in all parts of the news and business departments.

These are milestones in the Times’ legacy—and in the global practice of design.

But for me, Tom Bodkin is more than the sum of his accomplishments. He was my boss and is my friend. He made working, as I did for 33 years, at the Times fun. I was a senior art director (in fact, the only one for a while), one of my roles was as “consigliere”—although Tom didn’t need much counseling. He was prepared for anything, open to everything, and the most humane manager in a company where other senior-level chiefs could be, sometimes, difficult to work with.

When I left the paper, Tom put me on contract for another few years to ease my anxiety about leaving. It was hard to leave home after 33 years. It was hard to leave Tom, who was my eyes and ears at my beloved Times.

Now it is his turn to pass the baton. But before he does, we present you with this special episode of Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) devoted to Tom Bodkin and his legacy.

But before we get to Tom, here’s Dean Baquet, former executive editor of the Times with a few thoughts about working with him. —Steven Heller

You cannot overstate how much Tom Bodkin has changed the Times. In fact, you can say that there was the Times before Tom and the Times after Tom.

The Times before Tom threw as many words as possible at the page, with little regard for the reader. The Times before Tom thought tossing a couple of headshots on the page was all the visual journalism we needed. The Times before Tom held to a hierarchy where designers were the other, somehow not quite journalists.

Then there is The New York Times after Tom.

Tom taught us that design was not only integral to journalism, it was in fact integral to storytelling at its height. The front page that listed the COVID dead was more powerful than any one story could ever be.

Roy Peter Clark, the writing guru at the Poynter Institute, captured it best:

“Nothing much on that front page looked like news as we understand it, that is, the transmission of information,” he wrote. “Instead it felt like a graphic representation of the tolling of bells. A litany of the dead.”

Personally, Tom taught me something that made it easier to lead the newsroom in the digital age: Design demands a level of open-mindedness to the possibilities of different types of storytelling. It also rewards collaboration, since the most perfect stories are told by different disciplines working together to convey the best version of the truth every day.

Those, in fact, are the qualities that mark the modern, digital New York Times. Qualities that honestly have made it the most successful news report of the day.

Hard to imagine we—certainly not I—would have been prepared for this new world without Tom’s leadership.

—Dean Baquet, Editor-in-Chief (2014–2022), The New York Times

You may not know Tom Bodkin’s name, but that’s by design. In his 40-plus years at The New York Times he never sought the spotlight. But his influence is undeniable.

Tom understood that the experience of the news was much more than just reading the stories. He knew that design is a powerful tool that can be used not just to clarify a point, but to make one. He recognized—and he helped editors recognize—that design is part of what makes an emotional connection with readers, that it can be provocative or sobering or inspiring. And he fought for the designers that crafted these experiences to be on equal footing with the editors.

Tom set the standards for design at the Times. He had a very sophisticated sense of the brand, the ways it could stretch—and the places it should and shouldn’t go—and how all that evolved over time. (This is partly why he was so smart about knowing when to break the rules.) From our identity and typefaces, to how the front page is laid out, to the elevation of visual journalism and experience of our apps, he saw design as fundamental to our mission and to everything we make.

He built and nurtured a community of talented designers to carry out this mission. He showed us all a different way to lead—a way that elevated others.

To me, Tom was a mentor, a sounding board and a friend. He encouraged me to push for the things I felt strongly about. He made me feel comfortable experimenting and pushing the boundaries in my work at the magazine.

I knew he was always behind me and I know many others felt the same.

—Gail Bichler, Creative Director, The New York Times Magazine.

**“More powerful than any one story could ever be”—Bodkin‘s design for the Times’ coverage of the Covid crisis.**

Steven Heller: Before we dig into the Times, Tom, will you talk briefly about how you, a college dropout with no design experience, became a designer? I guess we should start with your college newspaper at Brown.

Tom Bodkin: Actually it really began before that, with my high school newspaper. I was the editor-in-chief of the high school newspaper. And design really wasn’t a field that anybody talked about and there was no designer for the newspaper, so the chief editor also did the design. Which I did.

And I really enjoyed that. And I actually enjoyed it more than the writing that I had to do associated with the newspaper and the editing. I found the actual kind of design and production of the newspaper more enjoyable. But it wasn’t something I thought about as a career. It really wasn’t on my radar—design as a career.

And then I went to Brown University and joined the newspaper there. Brown had a—still does have—a daily newspaper that was independent of the university, financially. And they needed a production manager. And it was a paying job, which I needed at the time. So I started working there as the production manager. And again there wasn’t really a designer. So I got much more interested in design and a little more practiced at it.

Steven Heller: And then you went on to another newspaper, right?

Tom Bodkin: What happened was I left Brown. It actually was officially a leave of absence, which I never ended up returning from. But I left Brown after about a year and a half. And then moved to New York and needed a job. Again design wasn’t necessarily in focus for me. But I answered an ad in The Village Voice to be a production manager of a little weekly gay bar guide.

And I took that job and again, there was no designer, so I designed the publication, and then went on to work for Ralph Ginzburg, which was my first real, serious job. Ralph Ginzburg was reviving Avant Garde magazine. This was after the original Avant Garde magazine folded while he was in prison—Steve, you know all about this. And he was now out of prison and was going to start up Avant Garde again in a new format as a tabloid newspaper. And he hired me, not as the design director, but as the art editor.

Steven Heller: Was Herb Lubalin still designing it?

Tom Bodkin: And Lubalin was designing it. But there was actually somebody that Lubalin found that was the in-house designer, who did the format and prototyping and did some of the design work, I imagine. Only one issue was published.

Steven Heller: I remember that one issue. It was full color.

Tom Bodkin: That one issue was published and it wasn’t successful so Ralph dropped it. And he was already publishing another tabloid newspaper format magazine called Money’s Worth. And and so I became the art director of Money’s Worth and he did a lot of print marketing.

And he did mailing pieces and inserts into Sunday papers. And I started designing—really, Herb Lubalin would design the ads or do a sketch and I would complete the ad. It was a tremendous learning experience. So that was my first real kind of high-end design experience.

Steven Heller: Then your next step was meeting Lou Dorfsman.

Tom Bodkin: Lou Dorfsman was the one who sent me to see Ginzberg. And so when I started getting more interested in design, Lou Dorfsman was the design director of CBS. I went to see him and he hired me at CBS.

“The idea of sophisticated design in a newspaper really didn’t exist until the 1950s, 60s. Before that there was really no design.”

Steven Heller: At CBS you were doing ads?

Tom Bodkin: It was collateral. Marketing collateral for TV shows. But we worked on some television openings, sets for Walter Cronkite, kind of anything.

Steven Heller: And was it Lou Dorfsman who introduced you to Lou Silverstein?

Tom Bodkin: That’s right. At a certain point I was getting a little restless at CBS. And I had done a publication, a monthly sports newsletter to promote CBS sports. And I realized that I really loved periodical design. And I liked it better than creating marketing for another product. Actually creating the product itself had more appeal to me.

And Lou Dorfsman introduced me to Lou Silverstein. I went to see Lou Silverstein. He looked at my work and was interested, but he didn’t have a job opening at the time. But The New York Times was starting a new magazine. The New York Times was pretty heavily into the magazine business in that era.

Steven Heller: Yeah, they owned a golfing magazine and a few other things.

Tom Bodkin: Yeah. They had a productive magazine group going. They owned a golf magazine, they owned Family Circle, Tennis magazine. And they decided that they wanted to start a new magazine. They’d never started a magazine before. They bought existing magazines. So the magazine group wanted to start a new magazine in competition with People magazine.

And it was Us magazine, which still exists. The New York Times founded that magazine. And Lou wasn’t directly involved in the magazine. But he sent me over there because they were looking for a design director for the magazine. And they hired me.

So I began working on the initial format for Us magazine, launched it. It was a biweekly at the time. I produced that magazine for two years at which point The New York Times sold the magazine. Eventually it ended up being owned by Jann Wenner.

Steven Heller: Yeah, Rolling Stone owned it for a while.

Tom Bodkin: Yeah, Jan Wenner’s operation owned it for a good period of time. I believe it’s now owned by American Media (now A360 Media). So I had sort of been in touch with Lou while I was working in the magazine, and he wanted to bring me over to the newspaper. But he couldn’t steal me away from this sister publication. But as soon as it was sold, he brought me to the newspaper. He had an opening at that moment for an art director for the weekly Home section that had begun probably three years earlier, two years earlier, when Lou introduced—

Steven Heller: —the “C” sections.

Tom Bodkin: And so I came aboard as the art director for the weekly Home section.

Steven Heller: I remember the day you showed up.

Tom Bodkin: You were there.

Steven Heller: Yeah, I was there. You were there with a unique, wave of gray hair in the middle of your otherwise—

Tom Bodkin: —the rest of it has caught up now. People listening to this can’t see that, but you can see it, Steve.

Steven Heller: I can see it.

Tom Bodkin: But I did. I had this gray streak in the front.

Steven Heller: And you smoked like a chimney.

Tom Bodkin: I never smoked like a chimney! But I did smoke. I have a good smoking anecdote that I can tell you. When I worked for Us magazine, we would photograph celebrities and we had a photo shoot with Lauren Bacall. She lived in The Dakota and, as the art director, I went along for the shoot. And the only thing I really recall was Lauren Bacall bumming a cigarette from me because I was smoking at the time. And I was trying to quit smoking, so I was smoking some low-tar cigarettes. And she bummed a cigarette and then complained about it because it was low-tar and she wanted a “real” cigarette. She did actually smoke the cigarette that I gave her.

Steven Heller: That’s something to remember!

Tom Bodkin: Yes. So yes, I smoked when I first came to The New York Times.

Steven Heller: And you did the Home section, but you did a whole lot of other sections as well. How did you and Lou get along?

Tom Bodkin: We got along well. I had tremendous respect for Lou. Lou was an extraordinary designer and certainly a pioneer in newspaper design. And he ended up giving me some special projects. One of them was the redesign of the Travel section. And I spent a few weeks doing a bunch of prototypes of redesigned front pages for Travel with stronger art.

And Lou took a look at them and trashed them all and did what he always did, which was do his own sketch on a large tissue pad. And he created a sketch of sort of an innovative approach to, for The New York Times, a feature section front, which didn’t include any stories.

It was just what we call in the newspaper business, “reefers”—referrals to stories inside. So there were pieces of art spread across the page with a little bit of text promoting a story inside the section. And for many years that was the format for the Travel section.

And once we completed the redesign, which was really Lou’s redesign not mine, I became the art director of Travel. And did the Travel section and then worked on a number of other sections. The Arts & Leisure section I worked on for a while. I did a redesign for Arts & Leisure.

Then I started doing magazine work. We were starting up a lot of themed magazines that would come in the paper in addition to the Sunday magazine. There were three or four different subject-specific magazines that I created and art directed. None of them lasted very long. One of them was a business magazine, there was a sports magazine, and there was a travel magazine. There was a magazine about New York City.

Some of them, there was only one edition of. The travel magazine went on for some time. And I art directed that for a significant period. They eventually all folded. But it was really fun to do these magazines with higher-quality printing.

**Bodkin and the news team plan the front page following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in California**

“I always thought that collaboration between editors and designers was where the magic happened in publication design.”

Steven Heller: So you were a roving art director?

Tom Bodkin: Yeah, I guess. I was a special projects art director for a while. And then, you recall all this probably better than I do, Lou retired. At that time there was a mandatory retirement policy.

Steven Heller: Sixty-five.

Tom Bodkin: I think it was the end of your 65th year, yeah. If you are on the newsroom’s masthead, which Lou was, you had to leave the newsroom. And Lou did stay around after he retired from being the design director to work on our regional newspapers.

And his successor was Roger Black. Roger had been hired as the magazine art director several years before that with the idea that he would eventually replace Lou. And he did that. And I continued to do special projects with Roger.

Steven Heller: As I remember it, the higher ups were urging Lou to pick a successor because Lou was in denial about retirement.

Tom Bodkin: Yes. That’s why Roger was brought in—to succeed Lou. But Roger got a very generous offer from Newsweek magazine, took that offer, and left the Times. And then there was an interim period.

I was still fairly young. And there was a period of about a year when there was no formal design director. There was an acting art director. So they started grooming you, and me, and Gary Cosamini.

Steven Heller: And Ken Kendrick.

Tom Bodkin: He was included in that group? I don’t remember that. We were all made senior art directors. And I never really saw it as a “bake off.” I was never super ambitious or thought of myself in a high level leadership role, certainly not at the time. I guess it was Arthur Gelb, who was the managing editor at the time—Lou Silverstein’s partner in creating the weekly feature magazines.

Arthur Gelb was managing editor, the number two editor under Abe Rosenthal, who was the executive editor. And Arthur Gelb’s role was to oversee those feature sections and Culture. And he worked closely with Lou in creating those feature sections. And I had not arrived when those were started. It was two years after they launched that I came aboard.

Steven Heller: Bob Ciano was working on the first one, which became the living section.

Tom Bodkin: That’s right. So the four of us were senior art directors. And Arthur Gelb was interested in more, sort of, serious design for the news pages. And he also felt it was important if they were going to choose one of us as a design director for the newsroom to get to know us. So we spent some time in the newsroom. Did you feel it was a competition?

“I gradually rose up the masthead as it was recognized that design had a broad and deep role.”

Steven Heller: I felt it was a competition. I was in a cab with Arthur—a checker cab I remember vividly—and he said, “Do you want to be the design director?” And I said, “Tom could do it much better than me.” You’re welcome, Tom.

Tom Bodkin: Thank you, Steve.

Steven Heller: Oh, you’re welcome, Tom.

Tom Bodkin: But it really wasn’t something, I mean, I’m not just being modest, it wasn’t something that I was really dying to do. But I certainly was interested in the work. I loved working with journalists. And I love working with editors—people like Arthur Gelb. I found that collaboration really exciting. And I had left CBS because I wanted to do something that I thought was more concrete and more founded in reality instead of selling.

And I really love the newsroom environment. So I was flattered to be asked to be the design director. Which eventually happened. It was frightening, though, because I had no real management experience. I mean I was the design director of Us magazine for a couple of years. That was an art department of four people maybe. And that was the extent of my management experience. At CBS, I wasn’t a manager. I was a designer. So I had little management experience.

Steven Heller: But the Times was also not really a “design culture” at that time, despite Lou’s influence.

Tom Bodkin: The Times is a really interesting place. It’s a complicated place. Its core is journalism. And one of my primary objectives over the period of time in which I led design at The New York Times was to create more of a culture of design, a stronger culture of design for the institution as a whole.

And certainly in terms of numbers and impact that did happen to a large degree. As I think you said in your introduction, the team at The New York Times now includes over 300 designers throughout the organization. When I became design director there was a very strict divide between business and news. You either worked in the newsroom or you worked on the business side.

The product was solely-owned by the newsroom. The business side was really kept out of any decisions about the product other than its distribution and ad selling, and printing. But actually, the design of the product—what it felt like, its content—was totally in the control of the executive editor and the newsroom.

And this divide was deliberate in order to maintain the newsroom’s independence from business concerns. But it was a very strict division. People in the newsroom weren’t really meant to talk to people on the business side, literally. And so that was the setup when I became the design director.

And the art department was, as you said, about 50 people. It consisted of feature designers who designed those weekly sections that Lou had started, production people, and map makers. That was the map department, which is always a fairly large department.

Beginning with World War II, maps were an important feature of The New York Times. And so that was the extent of the art department, those three groups. And the news sections were not designed by designers or anybody from the art department, they were designed by “makeup editors.” And those makeup editors were attached to the news desk.

So one of the first things I did when I became design director was to take over all of those makeup editors and I changed their title to “news designers.” And most of them had no design background. They came from a copy editing background. And they knew how to layout a page, but they really were not trained designers. And the design of the news pages reflected that. And they weren’t even that involved. It wasn’t like a magazine culture where the designers are involved in the content in a deep way.

It was a bullpen of people and they were assigned different pages, different days. One day they do a couple of pages in the national report, another day they do some business pages. And they were just sitting in a group together and handed a list of stories and a couple of photographs for a couple of the stories.

Steven Heller: How did they feel having an art director take over?

Tom Bodkin: It’s a really good question. It was mixed. I think there was some feeling that they were journalists and they didn’t want to be part of an art department.

Steven Heller: Lou was resented by many of them.

Tom Bodkin: Yes. The idea of sophisticated design in a newspaper really didn’t exist until the 1950s, 60s. Before that there was really no design. But I took on that group and some of them were happy to be part of an art department and learn more about design. But some of them were not. But over time, I think they all became happy with that arrangement.

It was an evolution where I was trying to turn them into designers as opposed to makeup editors and introduce them to design thinking. So the first thing I did was break up this bullpen and distributed them on desks. The New York Times has organized new sections into desks that are either defined by geography, a foreign desk, metro desk, national desk, or defined by subject matter, a business desk, a science desk. That’s the organization of The New York Times, always has been, still is.

And so what I did is, I physically moved these makeup editors either one or two to each desk. And set up what I referred to as a “production pod” and that also included a photo editor sitting there. My background had been in magazines where photo editors and designers work together and there’s a lot of collaboration. And I felt that having that kind of a setup was healthier and led to better design.

I had two goals in mind when I seated the makeup editors, now news designers with their editors and photo editors. My two goals were, one, that foremost I just felt informed design is better than uninformed design. And being actually at the table with editors, hearing their conversations, being around when stories were assigned, talking about the photography before the assignments were being made, all of that was important to a high-quality design.

And that was achieved. They were much more involved and I think they really both enjoyed that involvement and did smarter design because of that involvement. Publication design is a collaborative process between an editor and a designer. And the designer's role is to organize the content and display the content in a way that’s compelling. And the same is true in newspapers.

My other goal was—newspaper editors are not like magazine editors in the sense that they certainly did not have a history of being involved in the design. Again, the makeup editors sat somewhere else and they weren’t really involved and they weren’t really thinking about it.

Newspaper editors are, and still to a large degree, involved in the coverage. They’re involved in getting the stories. And particularly in a daily paper those pressures are immense. And they’re not thinking about packaging. They certainly weren’t then. Some of them do now. So I wanted them to be, physically, with somebody who was laying out the page. So they would be involved in that again. I always thought that kind of collaboration between editors and designers was where the magic happened in publication design.

**How the sausage gets made: Sketches of *Times* front page layouts**

Steven Heller: And it was the news desk that really ran the show.

Tom Bodkin: The news desk was primarily a group of makeup editors. And you’re right, they ran the show in terms of how the content was organized in the newspaper. But I was breaking that up. The news desk still plays a really important role and still exists, but they’re not designing pages. And so I was talking about my two goals. The first goal I think I achieved, which was the designers being much more engaged with the content.

The second goal wasn’t all that successful. There were exceptions but in most cases, they just didn’t have the bandwidth to get involved in design. And all of this is changing. We’re talking about a fairly long time frame from the beginning of my career at The New York Times as design director to today.

And at the beginning, there was very much a culture of micromanagement. It’s not totally gone. A lot of micromanagement still goes on in The New York Times. But at that time, the theory of leadership was a lot about hands-on micromanagement. So desk heads had really, like, only two modes: either they were deeply involved in something or they ignored it.

And in the case of design, in many cases, they ignored it. In some cases, they tried to micromanage it, which just got in the way. That middle ground where they actually were collaborating with another creative person, I had a hard time establishing that. Certainly in the news sections.

Steven Heller: One of the things you accomplished in the feature sections was reducing the amount of interference or the amount of bureaucracy there was in getting pages approved.

Tom Bodkin: Yeah. Being the art director of many of those sections and having experienced that, I was struck by how many layers of approval we had to go through. And there was a bit of the “design by committee” phenomenon because you had to first satisfy your editor. And sometimes, if you were doing one of the lifestyle sections, there was an editor over all four of those sections, who also had to sign off on your work.

And then you would all wander down to the newsroom and get the approval of Arthur Gelb, who was overseeing all lifestyle and culture. And then it had to go to the executive editor. And it was just so many layers, and I just felt that wasn’t a good creative process.

Steven Heller: How did you manage to end that procedure?

Tom Bodkin: You know, I think I used my honeymoon. There’s always a period when you start a job and you’re new to that job to get things you want. And I think I discussed it with Arthur Gelb and Abe Rosenthal. And I said, “It would be a lot better if your involvement was actually more “longer term.”

Obviously their vision for these sections was important and needed to be heard, but I felt like they could do that in a postmortem mode over time. And if they didn’t like the direction, you know, I would certainly make sure that they got heard. And that it was addressed. But to do it live just really got in the way.

Steven Heller: There were also critical moments that were expressed through the Greenies.

Tom Bodkin: Yes. That was the job of the news editor. Even though these makeup editors and art directors all reported to me, the news editor still wielded a lot of power. And the news editor at the time actually had a pretty good eye and was very interested in typography. And he produced this daily package of notes critiquing what was in the paper that day.

Steven Heller: They were classic.

Tom Bodkin: And they were called “Greenies.” And there were compliments in them also. And the editor was Al Siegel, and he was really interested in design and production. The same things I was interested in.

Steven Heller: And he was encouraging design.

Tom Bodkin: He was very supportive and encouraging. He was very demanding and critical at the same time—I’ve always had bosses that were very demanding and critical. And so I think that was part of my test-by-fire.

*Times* journalists planning the newspaper that would report Barack Obama’s election to the presidency.

Steven Heller: So how did you cement your leadership?

Tom Bodkin: The art department expanded significantly when I took over. In addition to the makeup editors becoming part of the art department, the other group that had not been part of the art department, but did at that point, was graphics.

Steven Heller: The former map department.

Tom Bodkin: There were cartographers in the map department and these graphics editors were doing something other than cartography, usually. Sometimes the two were mixed together and we did explanatory maps.

Steven Heller: They were statisticians.

Tom Bodkin: Yeah. It was the early days of data visualization. Edward Tufte. I’m trying to remember whether any of his books existed.

Steven Heller: His books existed. He was influential to many people. He was supposed to come and talk to the art directors and the graphics people, but when he learned that it was only a few people he copped out.

Tom Bodkin: Is that right? But it was the early days of information graphics, certainly for newspapers. Magazines, Newsweek and Time, had begun doing information graphics. We used to do color maps—not color, but grayscale—for elections going back to the 1930s.

Steven Heller: And Lou Silverstein created those, what we called “sides of beef.”

Tom Bodkin: That’s right. “Sides of beef,” which was a whole page of graphics on a single subject. So that was a big expansion of the art department in graphics. And at some point, it was Joe Lelyveld who put me on the masthead.

Steven Heller: Yes. You got on the masthead.

Tom Bodkin: I got on the masthead as an ... assistant editor?

Steven Heller: Associate.

Tom Bodkin: Associate editor. There were, and still are, various levels on the masthead, beginning with the executive editor, then managing editor, and then deputy editors, and associate editors, and assistant editors. So I joined the masthead at one of the lower levels and then gradually rose up on the masthead as it was recognized that design had a broad and deep role.

Steven Heller: You weren’t a hard-headed art director. You didn’t have a heavy fist, but you had a presence. When you wanted something done, you got it done.

Tom Bodkin: My mentors, my early bosses, people that I learned from—Herb Lubalin, Lou Dorfsman, Lou Silverstein—they were pretty heavy-handed. And part of it was just the culture of the era. And so I had decided that I wasn’t going to manage quite the way I had been managed.

I felt if you hired talented people, and they were motivated, self-motivated often, which was the case for most people at The New York Times—most people who ended up joining The New York Times were self-motivated and they wanted to do a good job. They didn’t need to be micromanaged.

What Lou used to do—and in your podcast with Bob Ciano he referred to this, and I remember it very vividly—you’d show Lou an actual comp of a page, and Lou would slip that under his pad and basically ignore everything you had done and do his own sketch of what it should be. And his sketch was usually better than your idea. But I felt it was hard to really progress as a designer if that’s how they were treated. So I avoided doing that.

But then the other issue was that the art department was really growing during that period. And there was more and more design going on at The New York Times. And I quickly realized that I couldn’t do it myself. It was a big operation and the development of people under me, and the guidance of those people, and the support of those people, was what really mattered. Not what I could actually do as a designer myself.

And Lou had hired really good designers to do the feature sections—you were one of them. And those designers didn’t need a whole lot of hands-on guidance on actually designing. What they did need was support and facilitation. They needed their editors to back off a little bit. I spent a lot of time trying to develop that kind of a culture. Designers needed to be trusted. And I focused a lot on that.

And I also actually focused a lot—because the feature sections had strong designers already working on them—my early days were focused a lot on the news design and those makeup editors who didn’t have design backgrounds.

And then it became focused on things like bringing the entire package of The New York Times closer together in terms of continuity, and consistency, and style. Because I felt like the newspaper kept growing and was starting to lose its cohesion, lose its identity.

Steven Heller: And is that when you decided to change the typeface of the paper?

Tom Bodkin: Yeah. That was certainly an attempt to bring everything together. Most of the history in The New York Times, including when I became design director, the Times was using a lot of different typefaces. And this was a throwback to 19th-century newspaper design. I’m not even sure if you could call it design. Newspaper “makeup” in the 19th century.

So The New York Times at the time was using multiple typefaces. The feature sections were using Bookman primarily, which was a choice that Lou had made. Plus we were using Century Schoolbook, Latin Condensed, and News Gothic, and there were probably five other typefaces we used throughout the newspaper. Franklin Gothic.

And all the headline styles have a name. And the “A-Head” is the one-column headline in the right-hand column for what is ostensibly the lead of the paper. The most important news of the day goes on the right. And if it’s not big enough to warrant a multi-column head, it’s a one column head, the A-Head.

And Joe Lelyveld felt like it was an anomaly, because the A-Head was made up of, the first deck of the A-Head, the top deck, was Latin Condensed, which was highly condensed so you could fit a lot of characters in one column, but also a fairly light-weight. We didn’t have multiple weights of Latin Condensed, there was just that one weight.

“One of the things that I’ve always felt digital misses is the sense of a beginning and an end. The sense of what I call ‘thingness’ that a newspaper or a magazine has.”

Steven Heller: And it also had to be set on a pyramid or a stepping stone.

Tom Bodkin: We’re still setting both staggered. If it’s a three-line head, the top line is flush left, the middle line is centered, and the third line is flush right. That’s called a “stepped head,” actually. Stepped heads is a very archaic typesetting form that’s really designed for this very narrow column. And it forces “air” in, but remains flush on either side, so it’s structured to work in a narrow newspaper column. The New York Times may be the only place that’s currently done still. But it came from newspaper makeup and I had my reasons for actually keeping it.

But Joe Lelyveld wasn’t bothered by the typefaces, he was bothered by the relative weakness of that A-Head in terms of its presence on the page. It’s the most important story, but when it’s just a one-column head it doesn’t have a whole lot of presence relative to multi-column heads on the page. We went with a bolder type often and so he wanted me to explore ways to heavy-up the A-Head. And I took that further and I decided it’s time to get rid of this Victorian-era aesthetic of multiple typefaces and just bring it together a little bit.

But at the same time I didn’t want to lose the complexity of typography. And to a certain degree, the density of typography. There’s a certain look and feel to The New York Times, which has evolved over the years.

Steven Heller: Going from eight columns to six columns.

Tom Bodkin: Going from eight columns to six columns, going from columns that actually butted right against each other with a thin column rule and the type just was jammed. We created gutters. And over the years it’s evolved into a much more modern look. But at the same time, I was always conscious of maintaining a certain traditional newspaper feeling.

The density spoke to the richness of the content. And the typography—still fairly complex—spoke to the complexity of the content. And I felt it was important to our identity to maintain some of that. And so in various design changes that I made throughout the newspaper I didn’t want to lose all of that.

People always ask, “Was The New York Times ever redesigned?” And it actually never was, like the way a magazine gets redesigned where you start from scratch and give it a whole new look. The New York Times has always evolved. And certainly it was a process of evolution. We redesigned individual sections. But again, we were never starting from scratch.

There’s always been a typographic system. At one point it was pretty complicated and crazy. But there was always a continuity and we’d refresh the paper periodically or sections of the paper periodically in reaction, often, to changes in technology. The ability to do color or something would drive changes. The popularity of infographics involved changes.

Steven Heller: I think we have to get into what I consider the major change of The New York Times.

Tom Bodkin: Okay, so in a way the Cheltenham change, which was a major change, but still in my mind it was an evolution. It was a big change because it went throughout the paper. I got rid of the use of Bookman, I got rid of the use of Latin Condensed. Cheltenham was already a typeface we were using, but in one form: Chelt Bold Italic. I think that’s the only Chelt we actually used.

And I always liked Cheltenham. It’s a classic American typeface. It goes back to the 19th century. It was quite popular in the early 20th century. And to me it had the right balance of character, but not too fussy, not overly decorative. It has these blunt serifs that are almost slab serif-y. Not a huge contrast in thicks and thins, which works well on newsprint and more than works well—it has the right feel for newsprint, and the right feel for a newspaper. There’s a grittiness to it.

That was my thinking in choosing Cheltenham. And so I started doing a little research and started looking at the Cheltenhams and was thrilled to see there were literally dozens of variations in terms of condensation, and style, and inline and outline.

Steven Heller: And the variations often made you feel like you got a new typeface.

Tom Bodkin: The variations allowed me to maintain a complexity. I could create an A-Head that had three versions of Cheltenham in it. They were all Cheltenham, all the same family, so there was a cohesion, but there was also a variety. And it was that balance of cohesion versus variety that I was trying to achieve.

And I could see just looking at all these options in the ATF book that I could achieve that. And I had a lot of flexibility. We use type for a lot of different things. And there are a lot of different sections and a lot of different features that have to have different feelings. So I needed a range.

Steven Heller: So was there any public response to the change? It was announced in the paper.

Tom Bodkin: I remember no public response whatsoever. I’m designing a newspaper, which is a very practical object and this includes digital also, so everything I’m talking about is applied to digital.

Steven Heller: So digital, in a way, was not a revolution.

Tom Bodkin: Well, it was and it wasn’t. But let me stick with the Cheltenhams. So I found these Cheltenhams in the ATF book. It turned out Cheltenham was designed in the late 19th century by Bertram Goodhue, who was an architect, actually.

Steven Heller: He designed the Flatiron Building.

Tom Bodkin: Goodhue designed it for the Cheltenham Press, which was an early small press, to use in books the Cheltenham Press produced. And I think he only did one, maybe a Roman and an Italic. And those drawings were later bought by the American Type Foundry and all of those variations were designed by Morris Fuller Benton. And I liked the Benton drawings.

And so I went and started to look for digital versions of Cheltenham. And at that time, the only thing that existed was an ITC version of Cheltenham. And I really didn’t like that version of Cheltenham. ITC, in their interpretations of classic typefaces, one of the first things they did was to increase the x-height. It was a modernization and, I guess, enhanced legibility to some degree, but I felt with Cheltenham particularly that increasing the x-height really took out one of the basic characteristics of Cheltenham, which is that tall ascender/descender.

And I didn’t want to use that. So I went to Matthew Carter, and asked him to do a series of weights and condensations. I figured out a dozen or so that I needed to get started. And I wanted them to be based on the Benton drawings. But I gave Matthew the liberty to make adjustments where he thought he could actually improve on the drawings. And he did that without a whole lot of changes. It’s definitely Matthew Carter’s interpretation.

And since then we’ve actually added a lot to the family. Partly to accommodate digital needs, but also marketing needs, and other needs. We’d actually, in our marketing, deliberately not used any of the newsroom typefaces, but at a certain point I thought, Why not? We’re marketing the newsroom’s product.

Steven Heller: Yeah. It’s part of the brand.

Tom Bodkin: And we should use the brand. So that’s where the Cheltenham came from and then we ended up using it everywhere.

Steven Heller: Let’s now go to the next chapter of change and that is color. And you were responsible for the color committee. I was on it and I was against color.

Tom Bodkin: Most people, both inside and outside The New York Times were surprisingly against color.

Steven Heller: And there was one thing that you did to show the editors—you created a “spectacle.”

Tom Bodkin: It was very controversial. Those were early days of newspaper color.

Steven Heller: We were worried about dot-gain.

Tom Bodkin: Yeah. Dot gain. There were two things. We were worried, obviously, about the quality of the reproduction. And there was some really bad color being done at the time in terms of the quality of the printing. And we waited until the technology had gotten a lot better in terms of color web press reproduction. And we weren’t the first to introduce color. We were waiting for that.

We also had to actually build a new printing plant to accommodate color presses. We were at the time printing mostly in our office on 43rd Street in three sub-basements. And in order to retrofit those presses to color, we would’ve had to add another unit which would have gone into our lobby. We couldn’t build up. So we had to build a new plant.

But the bigger concern was that color was not well used in newspapers often. Newspaper design in that period was pretty inconsistent. And the kind of sophistication that Lou brought to our newspaper was not universal. Many newspapers misused color. And they used it just to be this flashy new toy they had.

I felt that color brought emphasis or can be used for emphasis. I’m very conscious of, sort of, the modulation of design in terms of directing emphasis to where we want it and using it to build modulation, certainly into the front page stories that are important, stories that are less important. And that applies to everything we do.

I’m a very form-follows-function kind of guy, in terms of design. And I felt like, particularly in the application of color to newspapers, that wasn’t always followed. And USA Today, which, at that point, was a very successful national newspaper, was still relatively new. I think they began as a color newspaper.

Steven Heller: It began as a color newspaper and it was called “McPaper.”

Tom Bodkin: McPaper, okay. For a reason. And one of the things they did was they had this little information graphic every day in the lower left corner of the paper that often was the brightest thing on the page and they ran it every day and sometimes it was something serious but often it was something goofy. “What’s the most popular apple pie for Thanksgiving?” Or something like that. And it certainly wasn’t the most important thing on the page, but it looked like the most important thing because it had all this garish color.

And that’s what newspapers did a lot of. To people at The New York Times and to readers of The New York Times, there was an implication that color was less serious.

Steven Heller: It cheapened the product—

Tom Bodkin: —It cheapened the product, made it less serious, reduced its gravitas. And we were a serious newspaper. And so I put together a presentation where I explained how color was going to be used for functional purposes—primarily in photography—because the world appears in color.

And if our job is to explain the world to our readers, color helps explain the world because the world is in color. And we would use color in infographics because color can be used really effectively to separate bars and charts, and maps in color and can give a lot more information than you can without.

So one of the things I did was a version of a front page that was meant to be the opposite of what we were going to do. And one of the things we do very seldom is use color in type. Once in a while we use it for an accent or something, but generally we don’t use color in type because it doesn’t really add any information.

My design philosophy is it’s never used gratuitously. It’s always used with purpose. That’s just the way I see the role of design. And certainly in the design of a publication like The New York Times. And so doing colored headlines—what’s the purpose of that? What are you adding?

And so I did this page with a bunch of color headlines and I put this kind of rainbow effect for the nameplate. And I used a big photograph of a hot air balloon to just illustrate how, you know, it has no real news value, but it’s “colorful.” And I was trying to say, “We’re not going to do this.”

There was a fear that we’d choose photographs based on the brilliance of their color. And I had to mitigate those fears—or try to mitigate those fears by talking about the stuff we weren’t going to do and showing what we weren’t going to do. And I showed it to different groups—I took it “on the road” to all of the departments of the newspaper, both the newsroom and the business side, and most of these audiences laughed at that pitch.

I got the reaction I was looking for: they chuckled—except for the circulation department. It was silent when I showed them the page. And then when I said, “This is really a joke to show what we’re not going to do,” they were disappointed because they thought all this gaudy color would sell papers.

Steven Heller: But you also did something with 3-D glasses.

Tom Bodkin: It was another, just, a little goofy thing I did. I decided I would do a front page with 3-D photography—offsetting the two images with red and blue. And at this presentation I handed out those little cardboard glasses, the blue and red 3-D glasses.

Steven Heller: So the A1 section was last to go color. The feature sections led the way. And in fact the Book Review was the first.

Tom Bodkin: You particularly will remember that the Book Review cover was the first color we produced. And that was deliberate to, first of all, learn with something that wasn’t daily. Because the Book Review was a weekly, we had a lot of lead time. It relied primarily on illustration. And it was largely to give the press room experience printing color before we went to something that was much more visible, like the front page.

Steven Heller: So I want to ask you, we don’t have a lot of time and I want to ask you about what this podcast is called, Print is Dead (Long Live Print!). The New York Times, in part under your leadership because you brought in people to do it and stuck with its principles, is a digital publication with a paper version that is sometimes used as an index for the digital. How do you feel the digital has influenced or changed the print and vice versa?

Bodkin in his workshop at home in Stone Ridge, N.Y.

Tom Bodkin: I don’t think digital has influenced print a whole lot. It certainly hasn’t influenced my thinking about print a whole lot. Partly because I think all of this is about an evolution. And certainly the transition from print to digital evolved over time.

We began a digital side in 1995—that’s almost 30 years ago—and the digital design has evolved tremendously since then. But even then I didn’t think there was a whole lot of overlap between the audiences. And I felt like people who chose to remain subscribers to The New York Times newspaper, as digital became more and more popular—and more and more effective, and more and more widespread—the people who stuck with print pay a lot of money for it.

For a long time our digital site was free. And I felt like that choice was a very deliberate choice and they wanted a print experience. They weren’t looking for a digital experience. Now, I do think that over time, the digital and print experiences have come together to some degree, mainly because of the evolution of digital into a more sophisticated visual product, which it wasn’t at its beginning. It wasn’t very visual. There wasn’t a whole lot of design in it.

Designers had a certain view of digital that was partly formed by working with what were very crude tools at the time. You really could not do much in terms of refined typography in 1995. The type forms were dependent on what people already had preloaded into their computers. When you specified type in those early days, you actually didn’t know exactly what the user was going to see, because they would see a version of what you spec’d that was in their machine that might vary tremendously from what you meant them to see.

So there were all these limitations. There were no columns. You couldn’t flow type in the early days. You’re creating templates and they’re designed to absorb any kind of content. And the idea is to make it as efficient and quick and simple as possible for content to be flowed into this template that you created. And it was all about making templates, because that’s all you could really do.

But this idea that the form and content were actually separate and that was healthy was, to my mind, insane. From the very beginning I thought, This is short-sighted. That eventually the technology would clearly develop and be enhanced. And all of the stuff that you do in print design you’re going to be able to do a digital design. And users are going to expect that kind of visual, refined, crafted experience.

Steven Heller: I remember one of the staff meetings where we went into the Victory Theater and Arthur Jr. got up on stage and he gave us the “State of the Union,” so to speak. And at one point, somebody asked him how long the print paper would last. And he said, “Five years.” This was over 15 years ago.

Tom Bodkin: Yeah. In the Print is Dead podcast, this has been brought up—and it’s always “five years away.” And it’s been, “Print’s going to be dead in five years” for the past 40 years. First of all, print’s never going to be dead. There’s always going to be a place for print. Its use is going to steadily decrease, as it has.

But The New York Times newspaper, as a print product, has actually held up longer than I thought. Actually, I was involved in digital from the beginning. I worked on the design of the first site we had in 1995, and then continued in subsequent redesigns of it, and then designing apps. And one of my, sort of, early experiences was overseeing the design of an early tablet app that The New York Times did in partnership with Microsoft in the early 2000s.

Steven Heller: I remember that well.

Tom Bodkin: Yeah. And that was a turning point for me because tablets actually didn’t really exist then. But Microsoft was getting really interested in tablets and wanted to partner with us to create content specifically for a tablet, but it wasn’t a tablet. It was for the future, really. And there were all these assumptions about what people wouldn’t do on a desktop computer. They wouldn’t watch a movie on a desktop computer. They wouldn’t read long stories on the desktop computer. A narrative experience was really not appropriate for the internet. That just wasn’t what the internet was for. That was a very strongly held opinion among early digital—

Steven Heller: —A vestige of that still exists that flummoxes me, and that’s the “reading time.”

Tom Bodkin: Actually, when we did studies of reading newspapers, the idea that someone would get through an entire story was pretty limited. They’d read the front page run. The number of people who actually went to the jump of a story off of the front page was always limited.

So I think that’s always been an issue. Yes, maybe, everything is speeded up and there’s more and more thrown at you. But our reading times are pretty good for the newspaper, for their website, relative to other websites.

Steven Heller: They seem to be a little bit shorter than they really are.

Tom Bodkin: They’re always shorter than you’d want them to be. But going back to those early days of digital, there were all these assumptions about it. And once I got this thing in my hand and started designing for it—we designed something called The Times Reader, which you could run on a desktop or a laptop, which is how most people consumed it. But it was really made for a future tablet.

And I realized that once you have something that you hold in your hand, the experience is totally different. These assumptions that you don’t like looking at something where the light comes at you because it hurts your eyes—that wasn’t the case. Or certainly in my experience, that wasn’t an issue for me.

But it was clear to me—and I always thought it would be Apple who would do this, because who else—that Apple’s going to come out with a tablet that’s thin, has a long battery life, and where the touch is very responsive, and has really great resolution. And I had this feeling that once they do that, print isn’t dead—but print’s going to really go over a cliff. But even that didn’t happen.

Steven Heller: No, it hasn’t happened, but more and more papers are—

Tom Bodkin: —Certainly it had a big impact but print is certainly not dead. I think our circulation is slowly going down, but nothing super-dramatic.

Steven Heller: Circulation goes down because there aren’t that many newsstands anymore. They’re all candy stores.

Tom Bodkin: That’s part of it. Yeah, we don’t have a lot of newsstand sales. Most of it is subscription, which is always more valuable to us anyway. But it’s not going to grow.

Steven Heller: We’re going to have to come to an end. I just want to ask you the question that might be on everybody’s mind, and that is, what do you prefer now: digital or print?

Tom Bodkin: Oh I use both. For the newspaper I use both. And I think I’ll always use both. I’ve stopped buying contemporary print books, fiction and nonfiction, unless they’re art books. Because I do find reading a book on my phone—actually, I have three devices that I read books on now, and I use them simultaneously just depending on circumstances. I read them on my phone if I’m just in a cab or something and I have nothing else with me. I have an iPad Mini that I read on, and I have an Amazon Kindle. And I use all three devices.

I find the Kindle, just because of its quality of screen, the best experience for just reading text. But I have no problem reading a book on a phone. The size of the screen, I don’t find that a big issue. It’s easy enough to scroll. I like all of that.

Steven Heller: Have you tried The New York Times on the Apple Vision Pro?

Tom Bodkin: No, I don’t have an Apple Vision Pro. I know you do. I’ve seen pictures of you with that thing on your head. You don’t use it for reading, do you?

Steven Heller: You use it for watching.

Tom Bodkin: Yeah. An augmented-reality experience. But I don’t know. Print is never going to be dead. And I think some version of the print newspaper is going to exist for some time. Will it eventually shrink? Maybe. Maybe it’ll be printed on higher quality paper at some point and be a more of a niche product. But print will always exist as somewhat of a niche product at some point, but it’ll exist.

Steven Heller: I’d like to end on that. And I’d like to end by saying thank you for 44 years at The New York Times, plus two at Us, the New York Times Company. You’ve been the most important person in newspaper visual journalism. And you’ve done it, frankly, without fanfare.

Tom Bodkin: What I’m particularly proud of, that Lou didn’t have the opportunity to do, is to bring a lot of those principles and values to digital. And actually, let me just say one more thing about digital. One of the things that I’ve always felt digital misses is the sense of a beginning and an end. The sense of what I call “thingness” that a newspaper has, or a magazine has.

And what it really is, is that with a newspaper, with a magazine, you have a visual model in your head of the thing, even when you don’t have the thing in front of you. The Sunday New York Times is a really great example of something that most readers have this visual model of the entire thing. All of the sections.

And they understand how the thing is organized and they understand at a high level what is included in the entire package and where it is. Digitally, we struggle to provide that to a user. Our home screen experience is a long scroll. And the organization of that scroll is hard to really establish in people’s minds because of its almost infinite nature.

But we now know that’s something to strive for because people want organization. They want to be able to navigate easily. And part of being able to navigate easily is having a visual model in your head of the organization of the thing. And so we’re now working on new home screen experiences that will give you more of that—going back to what the print had naturally, we want to build into a digital experience.

Special thanks to Dean Baquet and Gail Bichler for their contributions.

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