In the Aftermath of 9/11, Milton Glaser, Creator of the 'I ♥ NY' Logo, Declared That He Loved New York City 'More Than Ever'

In the weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, designer Milton Glaser returned to the image most closely associated with his name: the I ♥ NY emblem. His response was a new version, titled I ♥ NY More Than Ever, that recast a familiar civic slogan for a city confronting extraordinary loss. Rather than abandoning the optimistic language of the original, Glaser used it to express attachment at a moment when New York had been wounded.

The redesign carried a simple but pointed idea. A symbol created to entice visitors and improve perceptions of New York could also acknowledge a crisis affecting its residents and the country. The revised message emphasized endurance without claiming that the disaster could be reduced to branding. It placed affection for the city alongside recognition of its vulnerability, giving a mass-circulation graphic a distinctly post-attack meaning.

Glaser later explained the emotional logic to art director and journalist Steven Heller. He compared the public reaction to the heightened concern felt for an injured loved one. In his account, the city’s apparent fragility made its value clearer to many people. He contrasted that reaction with the difficulty of feeling close to a figure seen only as powerful and invulnerable.

The designer said he felt compelled, like many others, to answer a tragedy that resisted easy explanation. He told Heller that the words and image arrived together when he woke up, suggesting the variant emerged from an immediate personal response rather than a lengthy public campaign. That origin matters because the work was not simply a routine update to a successful logo; it was an attempt to give visual form to grief, solidarity and continued loyalty.

By then, Glaser was already a major American graphic designer whose work reached well beyond the New York campaign. He was also responsible for the celebrated 1966 Bob Dylan illustration, an image that helped establish his public reputation. The post-9/11 variation therefore came from an artist familiar with making concise pictures that could travel widely, be recognized quickly and acquire meanings larger than their original commercial purpose.

The first I ♥ NY design had been introduced in 1977 for an advertising effort promoting New York State. Its arrival followed a period of severe anxiety about New York City’s finances. Governor Hugh Leo Carey had helped keep the city from bankruptcy, yet the public picture of the city remained troubled by increasing crime and the effects of a recent sanitation workers’ strike. The campaign sought to counter that dispiriting atmosphere with an uncomplicated invitation to value New York.

That history makes the later adaptation more complex than a change in wording. The 1977 mark was born from a state-backed effort to improve a damaged reputation, while the 2001 version addressed a different kind of rupture: a terrorist attack and its immediate aftermath. Both designs spoke to pressure on New York’s identity, but they did so in different circumstances. One promoted confidence and tourism; the other made room for mourning while insisting that affection had not disappeared.

A civic logo cannot represent every experience of a catastrophe, and Glaser’s statement should not be treated as a complete account of how New Yorkers responded. Its significance lies elsewhere: it shows how a public symbol can be revisited when the conditions around it change. The phrase “More Than Ever” did not offer a practical answer to the destruction or its consequences. It recorded an emotional claim—that adversity had intensified, rather than erased, a bond with the city. That shift also limits the comparison: visual continuity did not make the two campaigns equivalent, because the later version answered an event that had transformed the city’s immediate reality.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine