99% Invisible - 87- I Heart NY, TM

Episode Date: August 22, 2013

By now, the story is well known. A man sits in the backseat of a cab, sketching on a notepad as night falls over a crumbling city. He scribbles the letter I. He draws a heart. And then an N, … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Sam Greenspan, in For Roman Mars. By now, the story is well known. A man sits in the back seat of a cab, sketching on a note pad as night falls over a crumbling city. He scribbles a letter I, he draws a heart, and then an N, and then a Y, and right away he knows he's got something. This is it, he thinks. This is the campaign. The man was a designer named Milton Glazer. The city was New York, the year 1977. A time and place commemorated by an entire genre of movies

dedicated to making it look like a terrifying place to live. Enjoy your typical afternoon in New York City, the most violent town in the world. Let's see the money, man. to live. The city needed a miracle, and it kind of got one in three letters and a simple. I, heart, and why. Telling the story with me is reporter Moog Zadie. Mel and Glazer created the design pro bono for the Empire State Development Corporation. That's the agency that handles tourism for the state of New York.

So the N.Y. actually refers to all of New York State, not just the city. So I still live in New York, and the sluggo is literally everywhere. Two shirts, hats, towels, plastic bags, oven mitts. For a long time, I didn't even realize that anyone had designed it. I didn't like it or dislike it. It was just part of New York. Of all the pronoun, verb, noun combinations that have ever been turned into a piece of visual design, I love New York is a pretty good one.

I'll guess that there's not a single person out there in Listenerland who needs a description. I do not have to tell you that we are talking about a two by two grid, the letters in a tight face with a friendly serif, conjoined by a plump red heart. Both New York City and State have their own official flag, but the heart logo may as well be it. And like any good flag, the logo can inspire a sense of civic pride. I remember the first time I bought an Iheart New York shirt was actually a couple days after 9-11. I was living in Brooklyn and I was on my way to work and saw the towers, you know, exploding.

And after that experience, your first thought is how can I show this city that I love it? And of course, the first thing that comes to your mind is this beautiful piece of art that says I heart in New York. And so I went down to Chinatown and I bought a shirt. And I'm pretty sure it was probably not an officially licensed product, but it was $5 and I put it on and I wore it until it smelled bad and it helped me feel better. The thing about the I love NY campaign is that it was so successful that it became part of the built environment.

So people started doing with I love and why, the same thing that humans have always done when encountering something in nature. They started imitating it. My name is Wendy Bryan and I make fleshush internal organs for my company. I have her guts. Wendy runs I Heart Guts out of her home in Tacoma Park, Maryland. She makes these anatomically correct plush dolls of eternal organs. Kidneys, spleen, prostates, you arrive, all with faces full of joy. Wendy started I Heart Guts back in 2005 as a tussure business. The dolls didn't come

until later. And one shirt was in the style a t-shirt business. The dolls didn't come into later. And once sure it was in the style of I love and why. Which Wendy knew was not totally groundbreaking material? You see, I orange New York on the Tropicana ads, you see t-shirts that say I stomach LA or I spade my cat. Spade like clubs, diamonds, heart spades. Anyway. You see, you know, rip offs of this iconic graphic design absolutely everywhere. Now Wendy is a huge fan of Mill and Glaser. Remember, he's the guy who created I Love New York. He's a genius, he's a brilliant graphic designer. You go on Etsy, there's about a billion different

I hurt in New York rip offs. And nobody ever says that that Milton Glazer is the one who designed this So I wanted to give the man credit where credit is due so on her website She put up a note right next to the t-shirt that called it a quote fun new t based on Milton Glazer's iconic I heart and why design a few months later actually on my birthday in July 2008 it was my birthday I got a season to assist letter that said that I was infringing on the Iheart New York trademark with my design and could I please destroy all the shirts and take them down from the website.

So I was completely freaked out. Iheart New York or really I love New York is intellectual property owned by New York State. You can't just riff on it with your own design and sell it without paying for it. Wendy made some alterations to the merchandise in question, like cutting the design out of the shirt and sewing it back onto another shirt upside down and off-center. The difference between an I Heart Gut shirt and an I Orange New York Tropicana ad is that Tropicana paid for the rights to use it. Most likely, it's hard to get details on specific legal agreements, but for the most part. If you don't pay and you get caught, you get a cease and desist letter. Ignore it, and you've got to loss it on your hands.

Though as far as cease and desist letters go, Wendy said this one was... Really sweet. I'm looking at this, you know. Scary cease and desist letter. And how all these like sweet little hearts all over it just scattered all over the page. Ironically, it may have been the shout out to Milton Glazer that got Wendy in trouble, or at least she thinks oh there's really no way to tell. I figured that they probably have legal spider robots that are constantly searching for search terms like Milton Glazer or I Heart New York or I Love New York. We do Google searches and we receive Google alerts.

I mean, I don't think any of this information is very groundbreaking. That's Claire Newman. My name is Claire Newman, and I am an IP licensing executive and legal counsel for CMG Worldwide. And we represent the New York State Department of Economic Development, who is the proprietor and owner of the I Heart and Y trademark.

So it's I Heart, not I love. It is actually I love. I can't believe I messed that up. Yeah, it's I love New York. CMG handles intellectual property licensing for, according to their website, celebratory individuals from then, now, and forever. They represent the estates of Emilia Earhart, Malcolm X, Frank Lloyd Wright, and a bunch of other famous dead people. And of course, I love New York, which Claire Newman

represents from her office in Indianapolis. Claire says about half of her workload is related to licensing I love New York. And she has a number of colleagues who work on it too. Though, to be clear, it wasn't Claire who sent Wendy the cease and desist letter that happened before Claire was working with CMG Her office works with interest inventors like two short manufacturers to license the logo as is or a company can pay to remix the logo Like drop a can of did with eye orange and why Claire looks for infringements on sites like Etsy, Polyvore and Pinterest She says people even report infringements to CMG and sometimes she just stumbles into them.

Like today, for example, we go ahead and mailing from a cruise line and there was an infringement inside the letter. So it was really coincidental, but you know, we found it. Claire says they have some other methods for searching for infringements that she couldn't talk about. Her job at CMG is about protecting artists, and Claire says the intellectual property is about protecting consumers too. You know, if you buy McDonald's French fries, you know you're getting McDonald's French fries. You're not getting Burger King's French fries.

And so if you started putting different French fries in the McDonald's containers, that trademark... That is the trademark on the container. Would stop indicating the source and origin of those french fries. So, you know, the reason people use trademarks is so that they can go back to trusted brands and trusted labels, and they know they're getting the same standard and the same type of product each time. But if CMG is saying that an IHardGuts t-shirt

is too close to the Glazer design, I got to wondering how close is too close. I want to play a game. Okay. Basically, I'm just going to give you potential logos that I came up with. Okay, like whether or not I would think that they would be an infringement.

Yeah. Okay. Let's say you saw I-Sumic, New Jersey. Stomach? Yeah. Um, I mean, I guess I would say yes. I bike Melbourne. I and then a bicycle and then Melbourne. I mean, I guess, I guess, I would have to see it. It's all about like the design and like what the visual is invoking. CMG is vigilant about trademark protection because they have to be. The way the law works is that if you don't defend

your trademark well enough, you can lose it. Say you think someone is ripping off work that you've trademarked and you try to sue them. If they can prove that you've done a bad job enforcing that trademark in the past, a judge can wind up siding with them. So it's CMG's job to err on the side of thinking that something is an infringement.

My position is that everything is an infringement. Wait, why? Because it's my job to protect the mark. Though just because Claire thinks something is an infringement, it doesn't always mean there's a cease and desist letter in the mail from CMG. They send out about 200 I love and why related cease and desists per year. Ironically, one of the people to receive such a letter was Milton Glazer, who, remember, did the original

I love N.Y. designed for free. In 2001, right after 9-11, in an effort to raise money for local New York charities, Glazer created a new modified design that read I love N.Y. more than ever. The state of New York went up apologizing to Glazer and chalked it up to a bureaucratic misunderstanding. Now we can go back and forth about whether or not this indicates that something is broken in trademark law.

But really, the more interesting question is why does CMG need a whole team of people working on I love and why? I mean, who would have thought that a government ad campaign from the 70s would need to be defended by a team of lawyers from getting stolen and remixed and modified into countless permutations? I don't get it. I just, I totally don't understand. And I have done a lot of things that are persistent in the culture, you know, stuff that

lasts five years, six years, nothing like this. It doesn't make any sense at all. And you can probably guess who this is. My name is Milton Glazer, I'm a designer, and I spend my day pushing things around until they look good. That's what I do. It was clear from the beginning of our conversation that Milton Glazer is really over talking about I love and why. He's done a ton of other work. He did an iconic Bob Dylan poster and Philip Rothbook covers. He co-founded New York Magazine. And at 84 years old, he's still working.

Just recently, he designed an entire visual identity for Brooklyn Brewery. Yet for all his expertise as a designer, even he doesn't understand a success of I love N.Y. I would have thought it would have lost meaning a long time ago. In fact, I thought that it would be a six-month campaign. I thought that in 77, it would probably last six months

and I'd be done with it. And then when it went through 77 and 78, I thought, well, maybe it has another six month ago. And then it went through 78 and 79. And here we are after so many decades and it's still persists. I can't believe it. I mean there is no doubt that I will go out into the street today and I will see half a dozen versions of it. If you go down to Chinatown, every building, every street, every side of a wall is covered with I love New York.

I mean, there are far more I love New York's than dumplings in Chinatown. I mean, why? Why does it persist? I thought maybe it would tell us. I wish I could. Why isn't it tiresome? Everything is tiresome. Maybe I love New York is still around because people just love New York.

But Milton Glazer thinks that its success has less to do with what the design represents and more with what it is. You know, I think it really is, has more to do with the peculiarity of brain function than it does to any kind of logic. Has something to do with the rigidity of that letter form and the attempt of the grid to contain the erotic nature of the heart. There's something that creates an act of closure and people, minds when they see it, that they won't repeat it. That doesn't bore them. They can look at it a thousand times, a hundred thousand times. And so on, I'm saying, I've had enough.

It's a trivial mystery, but maybe not. Maybe it's a profound mystery. Why people are willing to look at certain things over and over and over and over. I mean, this is show of Pierrot, Delifranchesca, the Frick, this week. And I'm going to try to go up there today. I don't think you're a Pierrot.

I love Pierrot. Why am I willing to look at the same pair of feet and the way they cling to the ground in a Pierrot? No other feet at any other painting can make me pay attention for that long. For my whole life I've been looking at that same pair of feet and I'll be looking at it till the day I die with astonishment. Why? Well maybe beyond the I love New York and the phrase and the meaning to the city. They were simply the mystery of form.

Why does a certain curve and a certain color and a certain contrast hold our attention and why do certain other forms bore us? I don't know. It's a profound mystery. Even still? I think the most wonderful thing about all of this stuff, all of graphics and all of language and all of color is effect. You never get to the reason. Maybe the I love NY design continues to hold our attention because of its infinite capacity for remix that you can substitute literally any part of the equation, the I, the heart,

the NY, and the cultural reference still comes across. In fact, even New York State is doing this. You can now find the official spin-off logos, I peed the New York, and I beach-balled New York. It is now easier than ever before in human history to take something and change it just enough to make it your own. Imitating and altering and remixing has always been the way that humans engage with the world, but there's a limit here.

There will always be a baseline need for new ideas to break free of what's been done, and say something truly original, and should you ever fall short of the mark? Somewhere out there is a cease-and-assist letter, waiting to tell you precisely that. Here's a post script. Wendy Bryan from I Heart Guts says that there's a silver lining to getting that cease-and-assist letter from CMG. The language was obviously very frightening, you know, will not be tolerated. Immediate cease and desist, there will be a fee. So it was terrifying, right?

And but later on, I actually was able to use the language from the cease to send out my aunt's cease and desist to people who are ripping off my stuff. I'm not the only person who put a happy face on an organ and I don't claim to be, but you have to use different colors and different shapes and you have to come up with your own idea. So again, thanks, Milton. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Mouge Zadie, Roman Mars, and me Sam Greenspan. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio, KALW, and San Francisco, and the American

Institute of Architects in San Francisco. Special thanks to Debbie Millman for helping this episode come together. If you like hearing designers talk to other designers about design and you will love Debbie Millman's design matters podcast You can find this show and like the show on Facebook all of us are on Twitter Instagram and Spotify But to find out more about this story including cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% invisible You must go to 99pi dot org You must go to 99pi.org. Radio to be out.

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