A page-turner: CC Studio delivers a whip-smart identity for The New York Times’ staff conference

State of The Times, an annual event hosted by the New York Times (NYT), brings together the company’s employees to celebrate their journalism, keep up with their business strategy, and offers them a chance to connect. More than just a town hall meeting, the event gets a fresh update for each edition. For 2024’s conference, Jessi Brattengeier – NYT’s Creative Director – brought in London-based CC Studio to collaborate on the identity and a motion system.

Starting as they often do by casting a wide net, the studio worked quickly to understand what was and wasn’t a successful visual direction, ultimately landing on a decidedly typographic approach. “It felt natural to lean into typography, a tool which is at the very core of NYT, and one that’s utilised across all of their various platforms,” Motion Designer Ewan Leslie tells us. The direction sat well with Brattengeier as well. “Part of the challenge in working with the identity system at The Times is knowing when and how to push the brand while staying true to the tone of our quality journalism. Often, my team leans into elements like typography and colour in our brand – rather than photography or decorative visuals – because we want every element to have a purpose and be contextually honest,” she explains.

The identity had to do quite a few things – it had to be flexible and exciting, be adaptable across touchpoints such as signages, merch and keynote introductions, and largely, hint at the breadth of media and content being produced by the legacy newspaper. To do all of this, the team landed on the open-book ‘X’ graphic creating a visual centrepiece, and injected it with a motion language reminiscent of “flicking through a book or a magazine,” adds Leslie. Look closely, and you’ll notice the page-turning motion being applied to the newspaper’s iconic logomark as well.

While the graphic celebrates NYT’s history in print, the motion work created “a cascading flow of content to communicate a sense of endlessness,” he adds, which nods to NYT’s far-reaching journalistic practice, spanning physical and digital platforms. “The graphic conveys a larger idea about the Times in a simplified way – from the literalness of the print pages turning to the constant change involved in addressing the news cycles,” shares Brattengeier.

The motion needed a bit of balancing too. The overarching system used “repeated typography, elements of constant motion, stacked imagery as well as three-dimensional perspectives where content runs off screen as if continuing forever,” shares Leslie. In contrast, the team created a refined treatment for key titles and speaker walk-on animations to heighten legibility, while secondary animations – played through breaks and on promotional screens – featured gentler, constant motion.

All of this typographic wizardry was achieved with only two typefaces – NYT Franklin and NYT Cheltenham, both proprietary typefaces drawn by Matthew Carter. “As a designer, working with predetermined typefaces can sometimes be seen as a restriction. This was not the case whilst working with NYT’s suite of typefaces, a synergistic pairing of a timeless combination, serif and sans, aided by the breadth of weights available,” adds Leslie. The team created a conversation between Franklin – used in the product and business side of things at NYT – and Cheltenham – the face of NYT, used across the newspaper and its website. “In bringing the two typefaces together and carefully balancing the x-heights, we achieved not only visual contrast but a conceptual pairing of the visual language of our business side and newsroom side,” adds Brattengeier, about the teams’ experience of working with the brand typefaces, ultimately creating a look that’s fresh, yet familiar.

Jessi Brattengeier

CC Studio