-By Dan Ouellette

Eliot Spitzer's stunning fall from grace is the just the kind of story to get New York magazine's creative juices flowing.

On March 10, when revelations about the once-above-reproach New York governor's penchant for high-priced hookers started tongues wagging throughout Gotham, the magazine, on its Web site, put it to readers to write the next morning's New York Post headline. Among the cleverest suggestions: "Spitz Hits the Fan" and "Up Spitz Creek."

One week later, in its next print edition, the 430,000-circ weekly, predictably, kept the Spitzer story front and center, this time by inviting some of the city's most talented designers--including book designer Chip Kidd and Andy Gray of agency Ogilvy & Mather--to offer their "visual interpretations" of the story. The standout entry, by Barbara Kruger, made the cover, picturing a smiling, now somewhat creepy-looking Spitzer in a conservative, navy-blue suit. The sole text, in all caps: the word "BRAIN," with an arrow pointing to the offender's offending bodily region. New Yorkers could be overheard gabbing about the cover for days.

When the Spitzer story broke, relates New York design director Chris Dixon--who, along with photo director Jody Quon, head up this year's AdweekMedia Magazine Design Team of the Year--he and his colleagues mulled "how we could treat it in an original, fresh way for the magazine, something that wouldn't feel stale a week later." Kruger's interpretation, he says, was a natural pick for the all-important cover shot, as it was "so direct, and also the riskiest and the funniest. It translated perfectly as a cover and cut through all the past week's media coverage."

The cover, Dixon says, is "the best place to surprise visually, to do things that are unexpected, unconventional. The cover is an event."

The Spitzer treatment came just weeks after another much-buzzed-about, Quon-orchestrated New York cover shot and portfolio by Bert Stern, in the Feb. 25 spring fashion issue, featuring a nude Lindsay Lohan recreating Marilyn Monroe's last photo session.

The cover, of course, chiefly serves as an enticing entrée into the magazine's diverse, page-turner content, which Quon calls "a complex beast that has a lot of moving parts, all of which require special attention." She adds, "The goal each week is to fill every page with something great. One of the greatest challenges is to marry the tone of a story with the right artist who can naturally tap into that."

Quon credits editor in chief Adam Moss, who, in 2004, shortly after taking the helm of New York after five years as editor of The New York Times Magazine, enlisted her and Dixon--who came aboard as art director, then was promoted to design director in April 2007 when Luke Hayman left to become a partner at famed design shop Pentagram--from the Sunday section. "Adam gives us a long leash to explore," she says. "I hope that each Monday I can come up with at least one great, surprising photo for Adam, and for the magazine."

In announcing Moss' departure from the Times, the paper's executive editor Bill Keller said, "I'm sad to announce that the new owners of New York magazine have persuaded [him] to take over their magazine and infuse it with his journalistic magic." (In 2003, financier Bruce Wasserstein became the latest in a long line of owners of the storied New York, which this year celebrates its 40th anniversary.)

Indeed, Moss flicked his wand and built a team of journalists and designers to bring much-needed dazzle and cachet to the legendary but rather tired title. The results weren't long in coming. Advertisers wanted in. (Ad pages grew 4.3 percent to 3,338 and revenue jumped 16.3 percent to $227.4 million in 2007 versus the previous year, per Publishers Information Bureau. New York comes in at No. 10 on this year's AdweekMedia Magazine Hot List.)

New York's peers also took notice, nominating the magazine for a truckload of awards for both journalism and design. In both 2006 and 2007, the "new New York," as Dixon calls it, won the coveted American Society of Magazine Editors' National Magazine Award, or Ellie, for Design.

(This year, it was nominated for Design, Photography and Photo Portfolio prizes, snagging a total of nine noms, including for General Excellence. Winners will be announced May 1.) The magazine also scored the Society of Publication Designers' Gold Medal for design and photography two consecutive years, and this year SPD named New York a Magazine of the Year finalist in addition to 10 other nominations (winners will be announced May 9).

"The magazine has always been strong on design," says Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. "Under Luke and now Chris, the magazine has kept pace with the times and always feels fresh, week after week. Ongoing departments such as the Approval Matrix use graphic design to its best advantage. The magazine's typography and art direction is always clean, creative and readable."

Says Moss, "For a [publication] called New York, it would be criminal to publish a magazine that didn't live up to the city's exacting aesthetic standards. Luckily, the absurdly talented visual team here creates a magazine that is alive with invention, lushness, grit, ingenuity and humor."

Dixon, like Quon, says Moss' leadership is crucial to the magazine's design success. "Adam has a wonderful sensibility and eye for great design," he says. "He comes up with smart visual solutions. He treats design at the same level of importance as editorial. It's not a step down--he believes that photography, editorial and design should all happen together. The way a story is presented brings it to life, or may take it to another level or add a new dimension. It feels special. It's a tight collaboration that everyone feeds into."

That kind of team play has helped solidify New York's following among consumers. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, subscriptions, which make up the majority of the magazine's total circ, grew 4.8 percent to 363,562 copies in the last six months of 2007 versus the year prior. (Newsstand sales declined 7.8 percent to 22,012 copies.)

Dixon says the magazine succeeds on a visual level because the design team has a feel for, and responds to, the creative sensibilities of the New York reader. Design fads need not apply. "In a certain way, we're a little old-fashioned," he says. "We've returned to the roots of New York, with a simple clarity in our presentation. For the most part, there's a mix of modern and classical sensibilities in the typography and page design, in how we use clean black-and-white--not color--type, which gives the magazine a rich, heavy feel."

What's particularly impressive about the New York design team is that it has to pull off this feat on a weekly basis, with Quon's six-person crew collecting visuals and dealing with photographers while Dixon's team of four staffers and two freelancers design pages. "The deadlines are incredibly short, but we thrive on details," says Dixon. "Everyone here has a love of the craft. It's ironic that we do all the stuff in a few days that book designers take a month to obsess over."

While conceding her job isn't as complicated as Dixon's, Quon is quite the juggler. She sees herself as a curator who "loves to collect things and put them together" and interpret subjects in ways that resonate with readers. "What we do is get beautiful pictures that are not only photographed in a way not seen before, but that also elicit desires," she says. "We use every kind of photography in each issue, including documentary, portraiture, still life, architectural, fashion."

Once editors decide on a subject, Quon taps a photographer she feels can best capture the story line. For example, she enlisted Brigitte Lacombe to shoot the elegantly striking black-and-white photo essay "What Were They Magically Thinking" for last year's March 26 issue, documenting the staging of the Broadway show The Year of Magical Thinking, based on Joan Didion's book and starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare.

"The trick to getting the right photographer is access and level of comfort level," says Quon. "Brigitte knew all three people, so she was able to enter a room, be invisible, allow life to take over and document it. The results are behind-the-scenes photos that are beautiful, poignant."

Quon also likes to throw curve balls, putting a photographer in unfamiliar waters to achieve a surprising perspective. The approach worked for a recent spread in New York's biannual spinoff fashion title Look by Paolo Pellegrin, best known for his photos from hot spots like Iraq and Darfur, who Quon commissioned to cover the New York, Paris and Milan fashion shows. "I thought it would be interesting to get someone who wasn't paying attention to trends or designers, who was an outsider, who was looking for something different, who had great journalistic sense," she says. "When his pictures came in, we were blown away. He took photos of things like the paper on the runway carpet that protects it from being soiled before a show, the complexity of the seating charts, the models showing up for the shows at 10 in the morning. The results were stunning."

Another stunner--the eye-popping Lohan pictures, in which she channeled Monroe--came about after Quon reached out to famed '60s fashion and celebrity photographer Bert Stern with the idea for a fashion spread that harkened back to the period New York was launched. Stern didn't want to shoot models, instead suggesting a celebrity: Lohan.

When approached, the 21-year-old, oft-in-trouble actress--a Marilyn fanatic, as it turned out--jumped at the opportunity. A session was arranged at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles (the site of the legendary original shoot).

What resulted was magazine and pop culture alchemy.

"The shoot was extraordinary," says Quon. "We knew we couldn't pass up on the opportunity to make this portfolio."

From a disgraced governor to a bad-girl actress paying homage to a pop icon, Dixon, Quon and their colleagues, it seems, never fail to deliver.

Says Moss, "Really, there isn't a note they can't hit."    

Dan Ouellette is a contributing writer at Mediaweek.