I Hate “We Heart NYC”
What I know about this logo:
—It’s the cornerstone of a new ad campaign by the Partnership for New York City, described by Curbed as “an association of business executives and corporations.”
—The “NYC” part is meant to differentiate it from the Empire State Development agency’s iconic 1977 “I ❤️ NY” campaign, a statewide initiative developed by the Wells Rich Greene agency and anchored by a logo from the graphic design titan, New York magazine co-founder, and erstwhile Push Pin Studios principal Milton Glaser.
—The designer here is Graham Clifford, a London/New York ad guy whose other work looks professional if a bit generic and derivative. Clifford’s intent with the type, in addition to its partial head-nod in structure to Glaser’s logo, is to invoke the Helvetica lettering of our subway system signage.
What I hate about this logo (Clifford’s, not Glaser’s):
—My criticisms parallel The Internet’s, but I’ll start with a quote from my darling friend Michael Grace Jr.: “The strange pairing of a vaguely 3-D emoji style heart with flat and lifeless all-caps Helvetica. The odd, awkward lock-up which is lopsided, asymmetrical and just not integrated in terms of forms in space.”
—The flat lifelessness of the Helvetica is one thing. And it’s not inaccurate to call Helvetica the official type of the subway system. But it’s only been fully in use since 1989. The classic look developed by Bob Noorda and Massimo Vignelli in the 1960s was a happy accident: the designers actually did want Helvetica as the systemwide standard after decades of typographic chaos, but they were limited to what was in-shop and went with Akzidenz-Grotesk. This is the visual identity that Gen-X and younger Boomer New Yorkers grew up knowing and loving, and it’s its own flavor distinct from the now-ubiquitous Helvetica, a cool-as-all-hell midcentury Euro-chic typeface beaten to death from overuse in the 21st century race toward uncluttered minimalism. The Akzidenz variation offers a legibility of style, something that really resonates as a key part of our subway history, and the Helvetica of the Clifford NYC logo misses all of that.
—The left-alignment of the lettering looks sloppy; it’s the stem of the W lined up with the base of the N, and the base of the W juts out haphazardly. (Glaser’s original logo was center-aligned, with the heart nestled above the Y in “NY.” It’s all very compact, proportional, and pleasing.)
—Again, ostensibly this new logo is not meant to kick Glaser’s to the curb. They were commissioned by different entities for different purposes, and will live (ostensibly) in conversation with each other. But dude just died, in June 2020, in our Covidtimes present. What I get from the “tribute” is more like the grabbed-power elites of NYC’s business interests having a flex, not unlike Winona Ryder at the end of “Heathers,” donning Shannen Doherty’s scrunchie and announcing that there’s a new sheriff in town. But this sheriff is our mayor and his name is Eric Adams and he does photo ops with celebs at bottleservice clubs.
—I don’t necessarily hate the “we” in the slogan, but I do tend to recoil at vague/unspecified “we” usage. Who are “we”? Whom does it include and exclude? Do all 8.468 million New Yorkers in NYC love NYC, even when investment groups are snapping up all the housing rental stock, and longtime neighborhood shops are turned into venture capital coffee under cover of night? And every schlub who commutes in from Jersey or the Island and then goes home, do they love NYC too? You know that’s not true. “I” as something you can feel personally strikes a universality. When “we” shows up in marketing, it seems disingenuous, like collectivism by committee. The “we” / ”I” conversation makes me think of a detail I’ve always loved about the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome”: the lyric “I do believe.” The POV is one person who believes in the power of the people, and the specificity and subjectivity go right to the heart.
