I♥NY: Part 2

A little while ago I blogged about the I♥NY logo as an icon of postmodern popular culture (read it here). I decided to interrogate some of these ideas further for my VCT essay, and thought I’d share some of the additional ideas this generated:

Previously I suggested one of the most obvious influences on Glaser’s red heart was the Virginia is for Lovers campaign in 1969.

While the comparisons with this campaign are obvious, I discovered the use of hearts in logos design throughout the 1970s was not without precedent, and further, that the heart in Glaser’s design is almost identical in form and scale to another NYC logo designed 5 years earlier, for the Mayor’s Office for Volunteers, NYC.


Similarly, Glaser’s decision to use the American Typewriter typeface was perhaps motivated by a desire to look “un-designed” or banal, but it is also possible he was responding to the Typewriter Art movement, which gained prominence throughout the late 1960s and explored the use of the typewriter as an artistic tool. One of the preoccupations of the Typewriter Art movement was to explore ways of representing the city, and so there may be a sense that Glaser was responding to these explorations and using the very tools of communication to capture the spirit of the metropolis he was trying to revive.


It is Glaser’s engagement with the visual surroundings of the time which is important - previously I suggested the apparent lack of the originating author in Glaser’s design aligns the aesthetic of logo with postmodernism, yet the logo is clearly influenced by a very specific time and place… As such, I♥NY is both of its time and outside of time – and it is this that speaks to postmodern society, a society in which ‘we have lost our ability to locate ourselves historically…a society [in which] we have become incapable of dealing with time’ (M. Sarup, Post-structuralism & Postmodernism).

In the course of writing my VCT essay I realised that I had initially failed to interrogate properly one of the most important aspects of the logo – the invitation for reappropriation. The logo was initially not trademarked in order to encourage New York’s residents to take ownership of it and to foster a sense of community and this may be why it is so readily adopted and bastardised – there is a sense of collective ownership of the design itself, along with an impulse to endorse it or reimagine it accordingly.


Interestingly, Glaser himself said in 1972 (3 years pre I♥NY):

Because design deals with familiar forms, much of it depends on cliché. In fact, the study of cliché as a mode of expression is fundamental to an understanding of design. Cliché’s are symbols or devices that have lost their power and magic; yet they persist because of some kind of essential truth. Clichés are fundamental sources of information, debased sources waiting to receive new energy.

In essence then, the simplicity of the form of I♥NY, together with the lack of an originating author, the sense of group ownership of the logo, and perhaps some sort of "essential truth", make reappropriation and reinterpretation almost inevitable. As a result, Glaser’s design is constantly reinvigorated and re-energised, and the sense of the logo as postmodern icon becomes intensified; for, what are the notions of simultaneity, the fracturing of a totality, parody, irony and pastiche, and the dissolution of the boundary between art and the everyday, if not postmodern precepts..?