Client:
The New York Times Magazine

Product:
Lettering

Medium:
Print

Description:
Every week The New York Times Magazine presents a typographic illustration as the masthead for William Safire’s column, "On Language." Safire's column muses about words and phrases that pop up in the news or current culture. He provides interesting historical and etymological background, and delivers his viewpoint regarding the particular verbal folly, flair, fossil, or feat at hand.

Rafael Esquer was assigned to design the masthead for the phrase “Tarnation, heck.” Esquer’s concept is abstract but evocative of Safire's regard for language as a living, evolving organism. The squiggly lettering suggests something like a "cultural soup" of language, in which words spawn, evolve, or even die off. It's an appropriate context for "tarnation," a word that is two mutations away from its parent "damnation” (via "darnation"). The swirling, tangled lines of the image also carry the tone of a curse.