Artist Spotlight

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Nicholas Blechman: Hello, my name is Nicholas Blechman. I’m the creative director of The New Yorker. There are many idiosyncratic design elements that can be found in the pages of The New Yorker. There is the wavy rule, the two dots that appear underneath cartoons, and there are lots of many little black-and-white drawings that appear as headers, to help articulate different sections of the magazine. There’s “The Talk of the Town” header, the “Goings On” header, and so on. 

And then there’s spot illustrations. Spot illustrations are the black-and-white drawings sprinkled throughout the pages of The New Yorker, measuring usually between one and two inches. 

I think of spots as kind of like the unsung heroes of the magazine. They’re visual gems interspersed within the articles. They’re published without title or caption, and they’re easy to miss. And they are the only piece of content that exists only in the print edition of the magazine. In other words, they appear nowhere online. In many ways, they’re vestiges from another era. 

Spots serve two purposes. They’re used as fillers when an article is too short. One can throw in a few spots to make sure the piece fits. And the second function of the spot is to provide visual relief from the many lines of text often found in The New Yorker. One of the design rules of The New Yorker is that there cannot be a page without a design element, to prevent the magazine from looking too monotonous. A design element is either a cartoon or a drop cap, or in this case, a spot illustration.

Otto Soglow perhaps contributed more spots than any other illustrator. His crisp black-and-white line drawings are exceedingly spare and minimal, with no extraneous lines. 

Until recently, the spots were disconnected, random drawings. The subjects were usually urban—buildings, skylines, street life, a hot dog stand—or somewhat banal objects—still lifes, like a table, an inkwell, a vase, and so on.

A few decades ago, the art editor Françoise Mouly had the brilliant idea of making the spots sequential and thematic. Rather than submitting isolated drawings that often look somewhat arbitrary, illustrators would create a series of drawings that told a story. Illustrators pitch a series of 10 to 12 drawings that have a little wordless narrative or unifying theme (if you, the reader, can make the effort to find all the drawings buried within the article and make sense of them).

Even though the spot illustrations are easy to miss in each issue, they’ve attracted a cult following. Each week, we receive many spot submissions on themes as varied as the water towers of New York, or the pets of New York. Sometimes they are topical, such as a bunch of people lining up to vote. Or they are seasonal, focusing on beach scenes or fall foliage.

Spots can be on basically anything. And that’s why, even though they are by definition very small, they are also among the hardest assignments.