The cover design of the New York Times is geared towards eliciting empathy, sharing the individual grief of bereft families with the nation and inviting participation in the remembrance of the dead.
In fact, the body copy of the front page is a list of 450 names of people who passed away, followed by their age, place of residence, and a short description of their life, personality or achievements.
The first experiment I ran this week was to draw portraits of families mourning their loved ones, based on Reuters images that had appeared in various news outlets.
The simplicity of the line and the starkness of the color palette, were reminiscent of the cover and meant to underscore the poignancy of the moment captured.
The drawings also picked up of the themes inherent to the design and copy of the paper itself. Each name listed is not just a person deceased, but also a family in mourning.
The word ‘incalculable’ in the paper’s headline serves two purposes: the first is to underscore the inability of the human brain to make sense of large numbers, and the second is to describe the pain of losing a loved one.
This second experiment hinges on the word ‘incalculable’ and seeks to visually quantify the names on the front page using a dot to mark each one.
The most successful iteration of this experiment was the white dots on a black background, which created a pattern reminiscent of a constellation of stars.
Prior to the pandemic, the United States had only experienced this level of mass casualties twice in its history, first during the Civil War and then again during the Second World War. Given the current political and socio-economic mood of the country, the Civil War felt like an apt parallel to draw on.
In researching writings about grief and the experience of the war, I came across an essay written by Walt Whitman titled, ‘A Million Men, Too, Summ’d Up – The Unknown.’ Though it had been written in 1875, its words remained as relevant and poignant today.
For this experiment I used one line from the essay, which reads, “- the dead, the dead, the dead – our dead” and created a visual that used those words as an echo of the paper’s headline.