Paris vs New York: Muratyan’s Tally, Miotto’s Animation

A tally of two cities rarely stays polite for long. Graphic designer Vahram Muratyan turned the rivalry into a friendly visual match: flat, witty pairings that set Paris beside New York until each city’s habits look newly strange. Motion designer Tony Miotto then animated that match into a short film that travels the same punch lines with color shifts, sound cues, and slick transitions. The page title Paris vs New York points at both layers—Muratyan’s illustrated tally and Miotto’s moving version—not at a hotel price comparison, a metro transfer guide, or a brick model of a corner bistro. The subject is graphic wit about place.

Muratyan, a Paris-based visual storyteller and art director, began the project around 2010 during an extended stay in New York. Homesickness ran both directions: New York made him miss Paris; Paris made him miss New York. Instead of photographing the usual skyline duel, he drew one comparison a day for friends and family back home. The blog Paris versus New York gathered more than a million and a half views within a few months and drew the attention of online design critics. Penguin later published the collection as Paris versus New York: A Tally of Two Cities, with exhibitions and print moments that included Colette in Paris and The Standard in New York. Reviewers kept returning to the same thesis: the work is playful rather than nationalist. Vive la différence is the point, not a winner’s podium.

How the tally works

Each spread or blog post isolates a cultural rhyme. A baguette faces a bagel. Grand Palais faces Grand Central. Cancan faces Lady Gaga. A croque-monsieur faces a hot dog. Quasimodo faces King Kong. Macaron faces cupcake. Proust faces Salinger. Sonia faces Anna. Pause faces Go. Au soleil faces Speakeasy. Amélie-ish romance energy faces Carrie Bradshaw mythology. None of the pairings require a paragraph of theory. The joke is recognition: you already knew these emblems; you had not seen them duel in matching graphic costumes with equal dignity.

Muratyan’s style keeps the fight fair. Shapes stay simple, colors stay bold, and captions stay short enough to read while standing in a bookshop aisle. The drawings are less maps than personality tests. Prefer the long café pause or the perpetual go? The cancan kick or the Gaga spectacle? A Haussmann balcony rhythm or a vertical steel climb? The book does not grade your answers. It stages them as equal icons in a shared frame language, which is why partisans of both cities could enjoy the series without feeling lectured into switching passports.

That fairness is harder than it looks. City comparisons online often slide into scorekeeping—safer streets, better bagels, denser museums, louder nights. Muratyan sidesteps the spreadsheet by refusing quantitative claims. A croissant does not “beat” a bagel; it simply stands opposite one in a bright rectangle until you smile at the rhyme. The method is closer to comedy writing than to urban studies, and that is why the images survived the blog’s first viral spike to become a gift-book staple.

Tony Miotto’s animated match

Miotto’s short takes Muratyan’s stills as source material and adds the one thing a flipbook only implies: timing. Transitions become the punch line. Sound design accents the cut from one emblem to its rival. A refreshed color palette keeps the motion piece from looking like a scanned scrapbook. Design and animation blogs in 2012 circulated the film as a treat for anyone invested in the debate—Trendland, It’s Nice That, We And The Color, Show Me The Animation, and related roundups all treated Miotto’s credit as essential, not as a silent remix riding someone else’s fame.

Watching the animation after knowing the book changes the experience. On the page, you control the pace; in the film, the edit decides when New York interrupts Paris and when Paris answers back. That loss of control is part of the fun. Comment-section combat thrives on infinite reply. Miotto’s version restores courtesy by making the duel look like choreography. The hot dog does not defeat the croque-monsieur; they simply take turns owning the screen until the next pairing arrives.

Motion also clarifies how much of Muratyan’s humor lives in silhouette. When shapes morph or slide, you notice how little detail the jokes need. A few curves make a baguette; a few circles make a bagel hole. Abstraction is not emptiness here—it is compression, the same skill poster designers use when a festival image must read from across a street.

Why the comparison still travels

Paris and New York absorb projections like few other places. One stands, in popular imagination, for measured café time, museum gravity, and street-level continuity; the other for vertical ambition, borough density, and a day that refuses to end. Those stereotypes are incomplete—Paris has haste; New York has stillness—but stereotypes are exactly what Muratyan weaponizes and softens at once. By reducing each city to paired icons, he shows how branding works on places. The baguette is not all of Paris; it is the souvenir Paris allows you to hold in one hand. The bagel does similar duty for New York. The tally makes that souvenir logic visible without sneering at anyone who loves the souvenirs.

There is also an immigrant and visitor emotion under the polish. Muratyan has described himself as a lover of Paris wandering through New York. The series is bilingual affection, not a courtroom closing argument. People who split time between the cities often report the same double longing he started from. The drawings give that feeling a public form: you can point at a spread and say, this is the tug, without delivering a speech about identity.

Historically, the project also marks a clean early-2010s blog-to-book pipeline. A daily drawing habit, a sudden audience, a Penguin edition, shop windows in two capitals, then a motion piece that reintroduced the stills to people who preferred video. Keeping both Muratyan and Miotto in the story prevents the usual internet erasure, where a popular comparison floats free of authors until it becomes generic “Paris vs NYC” clip art.

Entities worth keeping straight

• Vahram Muratyan — French graphic designer and author of the blog and Penguin book Paris versus New York: A Tally of Two Cities.
• Tony Miotto — motion graphic designer who animated Muratyan’s comparisons into a short film.
• Pairings — baguette/bagel, Grand Palais/Grand Central, cancan/Gaga, croque-monsieur/hot dog, Quasimodo/King Kong, macaron/cupcake, Proust/Salinger, Sonia/Anna, Pause/Go, and related flips.
• Context — early-2010s blog-to-book pipeline; Colette and The Standard presentation moments; English subtitle spirit of “a tally of two cities.”

Confusing this page with a LEGO modular restaurant set, a cost-of-living explainer, or a generic tourist debate would miss the brief. The subject here is graphic comparison as entertainment—first drawn by Muratyan, then set in motion by Miotto. The cities, as always, refuse to finish the match.

Which emblem would you put on the next blank spread—something the book never covered? A Métro ticket against an Unlimited MetroCard is too easy. Try a quieter rhyme: a pressed café napkin against a coffee-cup sleeve stained on the A train. The tally only stays alive when someone still wants to argue in pictures.