12 Favorite Time Out New York Covers by Chris Deacon

The news this week is that Time Out New York art director Chris Deacon is leaving the scrappy and brash entertainment weekly to become senior art director at Playboy magazine in Los Angeles. Along with editor in chief Terri White (who recently decamped to become editor of Empire), Deacon revitalized the look of Time Out New York, creating a series of bold, graphic covers that combined stylish photography and illustration, smart graphics, and a nicely restrained sense of typography. Since Deacon started in June 2014, TONY covers have been a never-ending delight, an energetic visual and verbal conversation with the Time Out readers that seemed perfectly attuned to the magazine’s young, savvy audience. They pull in elements of U.K. music magazines and American altweeklies, with a strong but refined NYC tabloid sensibility. Deacon carved out a strong and original visual identity for the magazine on a very limited budget, no mean feat in a city that features weekly and bi-weekly cover brilliance on a regular basis from New York and The New York Times Magazine.

Much thanks to Deacon’s work at TONY, we’ve been enjoying a golden age of New York City magazine cover design. Issue #1023 of TONY (out in two weeks) will be his last. Here are 12 favorite TONY covers designed by Chris Deacon.

(Above): September 2-8, 2015. Artwork: Justin Metz.

August 12-18, 2015. Photographer: Ben Rayner.