New York News

If you live in New York City, you need to read NEW YORK. That weekly magazine knows and shows everything that goes on in the city.
Inside the section THE WEEK there is a different illustration every week under the heading HIGH PRIORITY, and designers are invited to design it. Friday you get the manuscript and you deliver data by monday. As that takes no extra time these days, wherever you are, there have been plenty of designers involved who do not work in New York.
The website shows all the work published so far.
These illustrations show three of them as they appear in alphabetical order,
from Pierre Bernard, Paris,
Michael Bierut, New York
and Neville Brody, London.

The brief is very simple and extremely well presented. You can tell that competent colleagues work there:

How to go about such an honorable task? Go for something really novel and creative? Many contributors went that way, with varying degress of success, as you can see. Solve the problem and simply show the readers what the priorities are for the week? That would most easily be solved by setting a table in the style of the magazine. Or do what the client expects? Why would John Sheppard, the senior designer, and Chris Dixon, the design director, have chosen me for the list of contributors? Probably because they expected from me what I am known for: straight-forward, teutonic information design, in white, grey and red. This may be a boring prejudice toward my work and not represent what I really do these days, but better than not being known at all. And it’s quickly done. Minutes later I had the first version ready to be sent to John in New York. Three different colour versions, with quite a bit of greek copy still. As was to be expected, they picked the red one for final production. There was, however, copy missing, so the first deadline went by without me being able to make final artwork. On monday they sent several copy changes, but still no movie title. It took a few more days of email correspondence until we had all the copy. I had been on the road and kept checking emails on the way to keep up with John’s search for final and approved copy. In the end, it got to NY just in time for printing.

This is the version as it appeared in the magazine (colours do suffer from conversion between TIFFs, JPEGs or GIFs; the real one was simple red, i.e. 100Magenta, 100Yellow):