Sometimes you have to hide the body
Logo critics can be a tiresome lot. Sometimes their condemnations are spot on, but often their banter sounds like so much kvetching. They mistake reinvention for apostasy. They lionize logos that were actually hated when first revealed. And they have a creepy tendency to see genitals in everything.
Last week, The Partnership for New York City gave the logo haters a particularly tasty treat to gnaw on when it unveiled the “WE ❤️ NYC” mark to herald the launch of the eponymous, commerce-led campaign to reinvigorate a struggling metropolis. The new design is drawing heated, unfavorable comparisons to Milton Glaser’s iconic 1977 “I ❤️ NY” mark, though the campaign notes that this new mark is meant to live alongside Glaser’s, not replace it. That sounds a bit like having your logo cake and eating it, too.
I’m keenly aware of my city’s recent, troubling downward trend (shout out to my friends who split for the burbs!), so I’m grateful for any attempts to stem the tide. And, coincidentally, I once worked on a project with the new mark’s lead designer, and know him to be a talented and thoughtful guy. For these reasons alone, I’m inclined to be sympathetic to the new mark, even if it does feel a bit like the result of design by committee.
Still, I have questions. For example, what drove the decision to insert a bike pump into the heart? And, if the goal was to evince the subway system by replacing Glaser’s typewriter-like font with Helvetica, why not use the lighter cut of Helvetica actually used in the subway system? This heavier cut just feels bloated and at odds with the intended sentiment. Was Glaser’s mark too symmetrical or, put another way, does the new mark’s asymmetry somehow advance the cause? Did no one notice that this configuration also conjures the confusing syntax, “WE NYC ❤️”?
Let’s not ignore the message itself. Glaser’s design offered a masterclass in economy with just three letters and a shape. Now we have five letters in a much heavier font and a heart, a 50% increase in characters. Was the message improved by half? The sentiment in the new mark seems essentially the same, but the replacement of I with WE has something of a depersonalizing effect. The original felt intimate, like a personal love letter to a city that tends to make itself a bit unlovable. It’s like the subtle but critical difference between I love you and We love you in a Valentine’s Day card to a spouse, where we includes kids, a dog, and two cats.
All these questions lead to the most intriguing question of all: Why fly this close to the sun? The risks were great, and the benefits were slim. (History has its lessons, after all.)
I’m not into hagiographies of designers, and this includes Milton Glaser, but his three type-written letters and one flat heart managed to capture, well, the heart(s) of an entire city. For decades. Even to modern eyes, nothing was wrong with it. The team behind the new mark could have created an entirely new mark, or simply repurposed Glaser’s original. Or, they could have done what I think they thought they were doing, refreshing the original. But this just doesn’t feel like a refresh. It feels like they were trying to keep the spirit of the original alive without realizing they were saddling it with unnecessary heft and clunk.
Glaser’s mark was itself inspired by Robert Indiana’s iconic piece, LOVE, but without being a direct lift or adaptation. Why didn’t the new mark’s design team venture as far from Glaser’s design as Glaser did from Indiana’s? Wouldn’t that have been interesting? I mean, it’s hard to argue this new mark feels 50 years more modern than the original.
Basically, why leave so much of the corpse visible that everyone suspects a crime may have been committed? Either don’t commit the crime or do a better job hiding the body, you know? To use another gross analogy, it feels like an ill-advised transplant operation, replacing a relatively healthy organ with a faulty donor organ. Unnecessary and dangerous.
On the other hand, perhaps this is the perfect mark for our fair city. After all, NYC today isn’t what it was ten years ago. And ten years ago, it wasn’t what it was 20 years before that. In fact, NYC’s story is never done. It’s always changing. And each change heralds a new round of condemnations from those who rue the loss of the city that was. Except the city that was never really was—it just replaced an even older city that was. And so on.
I’m reminded of Jane Jacobs ruing the loss of New York City’s grittier roots from the vantage point of her Greenwich Village apartment, somehow unaware that her vantage point was itself part of a larger gentrification that replaced the city’s laboring class with intellectuals and academics who had a lot more in common with her than with the cold-water flat dwelling longshoremen, seamstresses, butchers, and other laboring folk she and her erudite friends displaced. When Jacobs decried the loss of New York’s urban authenticity, she did so surrounded by novelists, poets, artists, and folk musicians. Her cause was laudable, but couched in a somewhat surprising lack of self-awareness.
And with that, maybe I’ve just argued myself out of hating this new mark. Maybe it perfectly captures the spirit of New York City: constantly changing, always replacing the old with the new—sometimes as homage, sometimes as demolition, sometimes in between—but always changing.
This post was originally published by UX Collective on March 28, 2023