IHeartNY, Pop Icon

OK, so I’ve been thinking about the ubiquitous ‘IHeartNY’ logo and why it has become such an iconic design and an enduring symbol of popular culture. This post might be a little long-winded, so apologies...And some of the ideas aren't referenced, or fully developed, but should be relatively interesting nonetheless!

A bit of background - the IHeartNY logo was designed in 1977 by graphic designer Milton Glaser as part of what was originally a three month campaign to clean up New York City and boost tourism for the state as a whole. In an interview with Chip Kidd Glaser explains how

It was the mid-seventies, a terrible moment in the city. Morale was at the bottom of the pit…There was so much dog shit because people didn’t feel that they deserved anything else, right?...then suddenly the city simultaneously got fed up and said, “It’s our city, we’re going to take it back, we’re not going to allow this stuff to happen.” And part of that moment was this campaign.

The typeface used is American Typewriter and it’s possible Glaser’s use of the now iconic ‘Heart’ was inspired by an earlier 1969 tourist campaign ‘Virginia is for Lovers', which featured a similar red heart, although not integrated into the text.

IHeartNY has become such an enduring icon of popular culture arguably because Glaser unwittingly anticipated in his design so many things that would come to define contemporary postmodern/postdigital culture, including sites like Facebook and Twitter and ‘netspeak’ and the use of icons and abbreviations in communication.

Glaser’s IHeartNY is often described as belonging to the pop-art aesthetic and as such is arguably ‘modernist’ in design. It’s true in that the American Typewriter typeface utilises what was the ultimate in banal typography of the day as design. Similarly, the use of the heart icon from the ‘Virginia is for Lovers’ campaign could also be said to be drawing from and reflecting fragments of popular culture in a way that pop-artists such as Warhol did to a greater degree in works such as Campbell’s Soup or Marilyn.

However, while pop-artist like Warhol were highly distinctive in style, Glaser’s IHeartNY seems to resist any sense of ‘authorship’, as Glaser himself admits;

[IHeartNY] has an odd characteristic by now, that it doesn’t look like anybody designed it….It looks like a weird historical thing…Basically, you don’t have a concept, “Oh, this is something that was designed.” It just seems so…I guess, inevitable.

By avoiding a strong and distinctive personal style, the IHeartNY logo is also arguably postmodern. I recently stumbled across an essay I wrote in a previous life as an English Lit student on postmodernism and Shakespeare, and while the subject matter is obviously not wildly relevant here, there were a few quotations which might be useful, for example:

What replaces [the notion of ‘author’] in postmodernist culture and theory is not the absolute absence of style, but its detachment from the concept of the powerful originating author’ (Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture, 198).

So, in a sense the IHeartNY logo actually embodies the postmodern qualities of ‘transience and anonymity’ ... as a result it's unsurprising that it has been adopted by contemporary postmodern culture, a culture defined to a degree by a loss of personal style - a generation modelled on pop-icons:
Another aspect of IHeartNY's appeal is down to the ultra-subjective outlook of the postdigital age. Since the onset of modernism in the late 1800s, society has become increasingly ego-centric; Pre-modernism, we generally believed what the church told us to believe and were therefore governed by a ‘God thinks…’ sensibility. Once modernism had set in and iconoclasts such as Darwin and Einstein became more prominent and credible, we began to question our own beliefs and became more subjective, grouping ourselves accordingly, eg, the art world exploded into what would become the Naturalists, Impressionists, Surrealists, etc. And so, culture became governed by a ‘We think…’ outlook. Finally we have the postmodern, postdigital age, where the Myspace-Facebook-Twitter generation can communicate to the world instantly and easily their opinions, beliefs, likes, dislikes. It is finally the generation of ‘I think…’, or perhaps, ‘I Heart…’
Linked to this subjectivity in contemporary culture is the effect the postdigital age has had on communication, ie, ‘netspeak’. The last 10 years or so has seen distillation of language into icons (eg, emoticons) and abbreviations, (think omg, wtf, lol, etc) and conflations (think SuBo, RPatz, Jedward, etc). As such, perhaps IHeartNY has endured as an icon because it because the Myspace-Facebook-Twitter generation have adopted it as their own - it addresses them on their own terms, employing their familiar tools of communication, ie, a subjective viewpoint, and the use of the icon and the acronym/abbreviation.

Finally, I believe that IHeartNY has endured because it was never meant to. As Glaser himself admits, it was only ever meant to be part of a 3 month campaign. Transience and obsolescence seem to lie at the heart of the logo; typewritten copy was everywhere when Glaser designed the logo - a time before wordprocessors has become commonplace and widespread. So, the use of American Typewriter created a sense that the logo was something that was just thrown out there, typed out and chucked together as quickly as possible as a disposable and transient expression. Again, it is relatively easy to draw comparisons between this sense of disposability in IHeartNY and the throwaway essence of posts on sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Yet while the logo does seem at home in the postdigital age, it's worth noting that the typeface does also root the logo firmly as a relic of a predigital age (the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the transition for most businesses between the typewriter and the wordprocessor). Almost as soon as the logo appeared in 1977 it was already becoming out of date.

In essence then, this relatively simple design is the site of a number of inherent contradictions; it is at once ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodernist’, adhering to certain pop art conventions on one hand, whilst resisting the notion of the modernist artist-author on the other; it is a relic in one sense, an archive of a now obsolete typeface and a re-appropriated icon from a 1969 tourist campaign, yet it is also quintessentially contemporary, at home among the netspeak of the social networking sites so synonymous with pop-culture.
Perhaps it is these tensions which have allowed IHeartNY to endure as a pop-icon – In his text 'Of Other Spaces' Michel Foucault explored the concept of the heterotopia, an idea of postmodern space which he described as

The will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages…
Of Other Spaces, 26

While IHeartNY perhaps does not enclose 'all times, all epochs, all forms', etc, it is a site of various conradictions, which has, for one reason or another become a kind of place 'that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages...'


There are obviously a number other issues that could be explored in relation to IHeartNY, including the ironic reappropriations of the design, the development of the verb 'I Heart...' as a result of the logo or the idea of NYC as a luxury brand which people wish to buy into. However, one random fact I came across which struck me was the fact that in 2008 New York City spent nearly $1m on typewriters, mostly for use by New York Police Department...I thought it was an interesting fact to throw into the mix...