You May Already Be a Winner

Poster announcing seven accepted entries in the Twentieth Communication Arts Design Annual, Woody Pirtle and Luis Acevedo, 1979

My first internship at a "real" design firm was a bit of a bust. It was an old-school Midwestern commercial art studio, turning out hackwork on a dime with no high design pretensions. But it did have an incredible library. No Walter Benjamin or Guy Debord for these guys...

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Every New Yorker is a Target

Print advertisement for Target Corporation, Me Company, 2005

I have been a faithful subscriber to the New Yorker for over twenty years, but I have to admit that I had forgotten that the issue of August 22, 2005 was supposed be different. So I suspected nothing when I opened the front cover to find a full page, red-and-white illustration by Stina Persson featuring a woman's face, some vague neon signs, and a pattern made up of the dot-in-a-circle motif that is the logo of the Target Corporation: a typical image ad. On the opposite page, however, was more of the same: subway car, taxicab, skyline, boom box, Target logo, this time rendered by Linda Zacks. Turn the page, there's a single column ad next to the magazine's table of contents (an illustration by Carlos Aponte featuring more than thirty Targets in various New York settings) facing still another full page ad, this time a group of Target logos dropping over an art deco skyscaper rendered by none other than Milton Glaser...

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