Strongly Held Opinions
The New York Times
2025
Illustration series for The New York Times Wirecutter.
Could people who hate cordless vacuum cleaners become a biker gang? What would the car of people who are against letting your pets sit loose in your car look? What clothing identifies fans of the Dishwasher Pods team?
For this project, I wanted to represent the different personalities by imagining how those strong held opinions supporters could look like. The result was this series of paper cut-out illustrations photographed by @marcbordons that capture the moment when each of these supporters shows their positioning regarding the type of products selected by the Wirecutter team.
There’s plenty of times where Wirecutter’s testing and reporting has led their writers to have an “unpopular opinion” that goes against general trends. For this special series, they wanted to pull the curtain back and share their boldest claims that are rooted in our rigorous testing and bolstered by actual facts, of course.
These stories span a range of product categories in which each writer will present their “strongly held opinion” in the category they are expert in, and tell why they are so convicted in their “hot take”.
Texts by Mel Plaut, Elissa Sanci, Andrea Barnes, Gabriella Gershenson, Marguerite Preston, Maria Adelmann and Liam McCabe.
AD: Julia Harris.
Photos: Marc Bordons.
