Like a Pizza Hut that's been gutted and turned into an electronics store or that failed Jesus fresco restoration, the visible bones of something cooler and better—Milton Glaser's original design, dashed off on a napkin in the back of a taxi in 1977—make the new logo even uglier. "We wanted to reference the original mark but push it in a different direction," Graham Clifford, the designer behind the update, told the New York Times. Apparently, the font is supposed to look like the lettering on subway signs, something I was distracted from by the M&M-looking heart and weird, disturbing spacing.
By the sound of things, the intended message from the Partnership for New York City, the influential business advocacy group that's behind the We ♥ NYC campaign, is just as clunky as its logo. “We want to remind [people] they can make a difference, whether it’s on the block or in the city as a whole," Kathryn Wylde, the group's president and chief executive—who once described herself as "the lone defender of the billionaires"—told the Times.
Now, in the same spirit of fairness and positivity, Wylde and the Partnership for New York City's consortium of corporations and business executives, including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Con Edison, National Grid, Vornado Realty Trust, BlackRock, Meta, and the New York Times Company want to remind us that "we don’t have to maintain these divisions that have grown up between business and labor and rich and poor."
Although the campaign is striving to win hearts and minds of New Yorkers, it is striking that it hasn't even won control of the @weheartnyc handle on Twitter. Instead, that distinction appears to belong to someone named "Mark Scally" who joined the social media platform in 2009 and never posted. (The campaign hastily set up shop at @welovenyc_ instead.)
did the governor and the mayor try and buy this Twitter account from Mark or nah? pic.twitter.com/nb8BuA9xPf
At least it appears the billboard at the campaign's Times Square launch event matches the new logo—because it also looks like cheap shit produced on a shoestring budget.
Here in Times Square for the We ❤️ NYC brand at lunch, and contrary to the ad I do not like that a dollar slice sale now involves quarters. pic.twitter.com/aBGwrkICL3
Katie Way is a writer-editor at Hell Gate. Previously, she was a senior staff writer at VICE. Her work has also appeared in The Nation, Study Hall, Lux Magazine, and MEL. She loves talking to strangers.