On the AIGA website, design critic and scholar KT Meaney, formerly of Pentagram, has a detailed critique of the longstanding, beloved but, she argues, “stagnant” look of the magazine that Ross and Irvin built.

She quotes her former boss Michael Bierut, who praised the magazine as a model of “slow design” in Design Observer (read the star-studded comments, too), but concludes:

I believe that the New Yorker layout is comprehensively flawed and a revision is overdue. Any redesign is up against a begrudging audience of grammatically correct but graphically unconscious * standpatters (and design giants as well). So how do you persuade such obstinate admirers? The answer is, respectfully.

She goes on, “Break the gridlock (literally and graphically) and change,” calling for—and picturing—a proposed set of updates toward that end. (In his DO link to Meaney’s analysis, Bierut calls it a “convincing case.”)

As part of her close reading, Meaney reproduces a hilarious Bruce McCall drawing from earlier this year, “First-Ever Guided Tour of The New Yorker,” which our stalwart Martin Schneider brilliantly unpacked here. Martin scrutinized the “Wheel of Article Ideas” (“Logs,” “Naps,” “Oxen,” “Ballet Design,” “J.Lo I.Q.,” etc.), and found that, in fact, much of it had historical precedent in the magazine’s archives. I’m happy to have that image online at last!

* This phrase was hyphenated, but I removed the hyphens because they were confusing my columns.