On a sunny Monday in March, Tom Bodkin strolled through the sloping fields of his backyard, 150 acres of grass, quarries and forest, home to totems of his passions.
Next to his home, an 1850s farmhouse in Stone Ridge, N.Y., is a free-standing structure, where he stores a vintage Victrola record player, Marshall amps, a piano and wooden furniture, among an assortment of knickknacks. In a barn that has been converted to a workshop, there’s a motorcycle, and behind it, a pale yellow 1967 MGB GT motorcar.
He stopped at a 1946 ERCO Ercoupe plane next to the workshop’s entrance, propellerless but full of possibility. He said he found it for a steal at an auction.
Mr. Bodkin doesn’t have a pilot’s license, but he plans to fix up the plane and taxi it around his land. It’s one of the many ambitions — along with welding and learning to play guitar — he has for retirement.
“I love understanding how something works,” said Mr. Bodkin, who last month stepped down as creative director and chief creative officer of The New York Times. As he sat at the long, rustic wood table in his dining room, a copy of the newspaper splayed out in front of him, he meditated on his past — and on things yet to come, yet to be fixed, yet to be built.
“The actual making of things with your hands, or fixing things with your hands,” he said, “has always been very important to me.”
Millions of people around the world would recognize Mr. Bodkin’s handiwork, whether or not they recognize his name. Over a 46-year career, he shepherded The Times through various eras. He brought color to the newspaper. He introduced a typeface that unified the front page. He helped establish The Times’s website and later its app. In doing so, he brought a brand into the present and paved the way for its future — all while learning from its past.
Over four decades, he designed thousands of front pages, drawing the first draft of each by hand. There was one of his first, on Jan. 29, 1986, which reported news of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger; one he said was the most memorable, the paper after the Sept. 11 attacks; and his last, on Leap Day of this year, which featured a graphic showing how parts of the East Coast were sinking into the Atlantic Ocean.
“The purpose of the front page is to present multiple stories in relationship to each other and to the world,” Mr. Bodkin said. “It’s all about context, and the context changes every day.”
The news may never look the same, but there is a reliability to the design of the front page; a dynamic dependability to how stories sit in conversation with one another. For Mr. Bodkin, it’s about establishing an article’s importance by its size and shape, creating a flow across the fold. That kind of utilitarian design, he says, reveals a beauty that is greater than the sum of its parts.
“I do believe, first and foremost, that clarity is No. 1, utility No. 2,” he said. “If you create something that is highly functional, it will be elegant.”
He developed that credo at an early age. Growing up, every year around Christmas, Mr. Bodkin’s mother, an artist, and his father, an engineer, would create elaborate holiday cards by hand. His mother would stage a makeshift set in their home on Long Island; his father would take the picture and develop it in a darkroom in the basement. She would create custom lettering, and he would use a foil printer to transfer the design onto hundreds of cards.
As Mr. Bodkin got older, he joined in the work. “I helped both in the design of it with her and the manufacturing of it,” he said.
He was always interested in the mechanics of a process, which led him to join his high school newspaper, working with type as his mother had. Years later, while attending Brown University, he established an in-house typesetting operation for the student newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald. He enjoyed school, but wondered what opportunities lay outside Rhode Island. So, after a year and a half at Brown, he took a leave of absence and moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
He decided that his most marketable skill was production work; he didn’t think much yet about design. On the hunt for a paying gig, he answered an ad in The Village Voice for a role as a production manager at a small publication. During the 1970s, he parlayed his skills into various jobs at places like Avant Garde magazine and CBS, working under media titans like Ralph Ginzburg, Herb Lubalin and Lou Dorfsman. It was under their tutelage that Mr. Bodkin began to look past production and truly see himself as a designer.
In 1978, he was hired at Us, a magazine founded the year prior by The New York Times Company. And in 1980, he moved to The Times’s newsroom.
“I started as the Home section art director and at the time wasn’t thinking about being a high-level manager,” he said. “I just was grateful for working at The New York Times and under Lou Silverstein,” referring to the design director. But Mr. Bodkin made a splash after he redesigned the Arts & Leisure section in the mid-1980s. After Mr. Silverstein’s retirement in 1985, Mr. Bodkin assumed the role of design director.
In the 1990s, color was on the horizon. And though The Times had dabbled in color-printed special sections, the paper’s news sections had always been printed strictly in black and white, which some saw as a cornerstone of The Times’s identity. Many editors and executives thought color would undercut the paper’s gravity: Serious journalism was best signaled in black and white. Mr. Bodkin, though, saw color as an opportunity to bring the paper into a new age.
“The world happens in color,” he said. “Color is just more information. A lot of people didn’t think that.”
For months, he pitched the idea around the newsroom, facing down decades of internal standards at a paper whose moniker is the Gray Lady. Mr. Bodkin, as certain about the need for this evolution as its detractors were of its assured failure, went from desk to desk, describing color as a tool to enhance reporting, not diminish it.
Eventually, he persuaded the leaders. On Oct. 16, 1997, the first color photographs appeared on the front page, which Mr. Bodkin designed.
Mr. Bodkin’s legacy was formed in these moments of innovation; in bold moves and considered risks that elevated the newspaper. In 2003, for example, he replaced a jumble of competing typefaces with NYTCheltenham. It remains The Times’s main typeface. Around 2008, he redesigned reefers, inch-wide items that direct readers to articles in the paper, and grouped them on the bottom of the front page, where they still appear.
And as readers increasingly found their news outside of print, Mr. Bodkin, ever conscious of the user experience, wondered how The Times could interact with them online, too.
In 1996, he helped bring The Times’s website online. Though there were growing pains — the typography was difficult to control; typefaces were dependent on what the user already had downloaded — he predicted that the digital landscape would be populated with graphics, maps and interactive elements, all of which he helped steer in the coming years.
In early 2010, when Apple announced it would soon release a tablet computer called the iPad, Mr. Bodkin knew it would revolutionize the way people interacted with the internet. But it was difficult to design the news for an iPad without an actual iPad. So he and Anne Leigh, an art director, created a prototype with card stock and foil, true to the specs Apple had released. To get a feel for the user experience, Mr. Bodkin walked around with the model, which was filled with silverware to weigh the appropriate one and a half pounds.
This commitment to readers was always in the back of his mind. How they interpret and interact with a presentation, what emotions it might stir. “That’s the meaning of design, the purpose of design,” he said.
Despite technological advancements, Mr. Bodkin has remained grounded by the credo he developed making Christmas cards. Whether a reader scrolls or turns a page, there is a standard by which to abide: If an object is built well, it will, by design, be elegant.
“I do this little subconscious calculation in my head, always, about the ratio of substance to decoration of anything I look at,” Mr. Bodkin said.
“I believe in beauty,” he added. “I believe that everything we do should be delightful in some way.”
He finds beauty in the balance — of clarity and utility; form and function; old and new; tradition and innovation. That philosophy is not only built into his work, but woven into the fabric of his home. On his rustic dining table, a vintage microscope and an iPad — a real one — sit side by side. In his workshop, a rusted 1950 J.C. Higgins bicycle awaits new pedals; they’re in the mail, on the way.
The new inherits from the old. No matter what era an object is from, it will hold a certain appeal if people can see its purpose. The propellerless plane needs fixing, the guitar will need tuning and down the line there will be other endeavors not yet imagined.
After all, Mr. Bodkin said, “That’s the adventure.”
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