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Tag: grid

Published March 20, 2024

Klaas Verplancke’s “On the Grid”

I love this illustration by Klaas Verplancke for the recent ‘Style Issue’ of the New Yorker (which has a fun animated version of the cover on its website).

It works on lots of levels, but it also feels like a bit of nostalgic throwback. People look at their phones these days (although I did see someone with a word search book on the Toronto subway this morning, so some people are keeping it old school at least).

Grid patterns suit the cover of the New Yorker so well though. They work as a representation of Manhattan’s city grid and its skyline, as well as magazine layouts and puzzles. I was reminded me of Sergio García Sánchez’s “Modern Life” cover from a couple of years ago (itself a riff on Piet Mondrian’s New York-inspired painting “Broadway Boogie Woogie“). Chris Ware divided the cover into a comic book (ish) grid during the pandemic too. I’m sure there are more examples. (Grids are good!)

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Published May 7, 2020

Chris Ware’s “Still Life”

“Having lived in Chicago for thirty years, I’ve only ever been a visitor to New York, but I love it like no other city. Teeming with unpredictable people and unimaginable places and unforeseeable moments, life there is measured not in hours but in densely packed minutes that can fill up a day with a year’s worth of life. Lately, however, closed up in our homes against a worldwide terror, time everywhere has seemed to slur, to become almost Groundhog Day-ish, forced into a sort of present-perfect tense—or, as my fellow New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen more precisely put it, ‘loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself.’ But disaster can also have a recalibrating quality. It reminds us that the real things of life (breakfast, grass, spouse) can, in normal times, become clotted over by anxieties and nonsense.”

Chris Ware has created another brilliant cover for The New Yorker to illustrate April 15th, 2020, “a kaleidoscopic account of a single day in New York” during the pandemic. 

Its densely packed grid and the juxtaposition of mundane, ‘snapshots’ reminds me — perhaps more than some of his other covers for the magazine — of Ware’s comics.

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