This year, for our “Best of New York” issue, we once again invited a handful of top designers to submit concepts for the cover. Participants included Steve Powers for ICY Signs, Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller of Faile, Jason Kernevich and Dustin Summers of the Heads of State, and illustrator Christoph Niemann. All of the designs had distinct appeal. But after a debate rivaled only by the deliberations over New York’s best fries, we went with Powers’s take, which felt retro and forward-looking at the same time. Powers built a series of brash enamel-on-aluminum and spray-paint-on-Plexiglas signs that we photographed and then composed into the cover image. “This kind of sign-painting is a laborious old-world practice,” Powers says. “But it was everywhere in the sixties and seventies. It’s old Times Square, old Washington Heights, old Harlem.” And the newest issue of New York.

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