Slide 1 of 19,

You should have seen the letters we received in 1967 when the newspaper’s legendary design director, Louis Silverstein, decided to remove the period at the end of The New York Times logo, which had been there for 116 years. “How would you like to wake up and find your wife’s face had changed?” one reader asked. We hate to imagine what that reader would think of this week’s cover. We asked eight designers to re-imagine the logo. Four ended up on four different covers, and another four ran inside the issue. We also have 10 additional sketches. Here, the designers describe how they approached the assignment.

Correction: June 17, 2012

An article on June 3 about the different logos commissioned by the magazine for its cover misidentified the typeface of one. The typeface used by the design firm Helmo was AG Schoolbook, not Helvetica.