Target Takeover

Print advertisement for Target Corporation, Design: Me Company, 2005

Every New Yorker is a target (or every New Yorker loves cirles...tens of thousands of them). The latest issue of New Yorker is all-Target, all the time. Interesting discussion going on over at Design Observer...

As Michael Bierut observes:

The all-Target New Yorker is the product of more nakedly mercenary world where advertisers no longer need conceal their aims. There's nothing subliminal about it: I counted over 200 Target logos in the first 19 pages alone, and there were still eleven ads left to go when I gave up. The illustrators acquit themselves well: Robert Risko turns in a funny image of a substantial construction worker perched on a typically un-ergonomic modern cafe stool with a single logo on his back-pocket handkerchief; Yoko Shimizu turns in a spirited biker chick crossing the Brooklyn Bridge with the logo rising before her. Best of all is Me Company's vertiginous computer-generated cityscape, the last ad inside the magazine, which surely pushes the logo count well into four figures, if not five.

Target has long upheld design as the differentiator. It's their business. It's their brand. Why not allow Target to celebrate (and fund) illustration and design in such a great way? Not many brands could be credible doing this.

On a personal note, anyone who is willing to fund Me Company's design and illustration experimentation and get it out to the masses, like Bjork and Erasure before them, deserves applause.