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

The graphic designer revamped his world-famous emblem in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The updated design underscored the city’s resilience in the face of tragedy

Meilan Solly | Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

September 11, 2026 7:00 a.m.

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Eight days after 9/11, a familiar image greeted New Yorkers picking up a copy of the Daily News, the city’s self-proclaimed “hometown newspaper.” Emblazoned on the front page was Milton Glaser’s “I ♥ NY” logo—but as readers realized when unfolding the issue, the artist had made some changes to his ubiquitous design. It now proclaimed that Glaser loved New York City “more than ever,” with a bruise added to the red heart for emphasis.

“In the same way that we feel more deeply toward a loved one who has been hurt, all of us suddenly realized how deeply we feel about this city,” Glaser later told art director and journalist Steven Heller. “A confident giant is hard to love; a vulnerable one is not.”

An American graphic designer also known for creating an iconic 1966 illustration of Bob Dylan, Glaser came up with his “I ♥ NY More Than Ever” variant shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. “Like all of us, I felt the need to respond to this incomprehensible tragedy,” he said to Heller. “I woke up … with the words and image completely formed in my mind.”

Twenty-five years after 9/11, “I ♥ NY More Than Ever” serves as a poignant reminder of how New Yorkers came together in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Glaser “was compelled to reach out and offer a statement to the city’s residents that, in spite of the tragedy, they still had each other,” Dan Bates, studio manager at Milton Glaser Inc., tells Smithsonian magazine. The updated logo “was a declaration that the people and the affection they have for the city, and one another, endures.”

Glaser debuted the original “I ♥ NY” design in 1977, as part of an advertising campaign for New York State. Governor Hugh Leo Carey had averted New York City’s bankruptcy crisis, but rising crime rates and a recent garbage strike continued to cloud the public’s view of the Big Apple.

State officials “had nothing to help [New York’s] tourist program, no posters, no maps for gas stations, no bumper stickers for taxis and no money to make such things,” advertising executive Mary Wells Lawrence wrote in her 2002 memoir. “It was love for New York that brought Milton to our offices with a batch of posters.”

Glaser’s initial proposal sandwiched the phrase “I Love New York” inside two diamonds. But he soon came up with a different design: Writing on an envelope during a taxi ride in 1976, the artist scrawled “I ♥ NY” on a single line in red crayon. (His concept sketch is now housed in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art.) A revised version launched the following year, with “I ♥” now stacked atop “NY.”

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“It becomes much more of a shape, much stronger visually, than if it were running horizontally,” says Ellen Lupton, a curator emerita at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Glaser’s font choice, American Typewriter, also adds to the design’s overall visual impact: “This whole logo would not be as nice if it were Helvetica,” Lupton tells Smithsonian.

Glaser was seemingly under the impression that the ad campaign would run for just two weeks. Instead, “I ♥ NY” became “the most talked-about and successful tourism program in the nation.” As Chris Lowery, CEO of Chase Design Group, told Adweek in 2017, the logo emerged as “really the world’s first emoji. In a diverse, multicultural city like New York, anyone who saw it instantly knew what it meant.”

New York State’s Department of Economic Development holds the “I ♥ NY” trademark and is zealous in its pursuit of vendors who use the design without license. As of 2011, official merchandise bearing the logo brought in an estimated $30 million annually, and the state earned more than $1 million in licensing fees each year. None of this revenue went into Glaser’s pocket during his lifetime, but he didn’t seem to bear any resentment over the situation. “The truth is, I have enough money to live the life I want to live,” he told the Village Voice in 2011. “I don’t think about how it would be if I had another couple million. I have no needs that are not being fulfilled.”

Glaser did, however, run afoul of the state agency when sharing his “I ♥ NY More Than Ever” design. Initially, the artist asserted that “the state has no interest in using this variation of the logo, feeling that anything that acknowledges the 9/11 event might be interpreted as a sign of weakness.” Speaking with the Village Voice a decade later, Glaser said that the state “threatened to sue me [for] infringing on the copyright.”

A lifelong New Yorker, Glaser was deeply affected by the attacks on his city. “Except for the period he studied in Italy, he was thoroughly a New York creature,” illustrator and colleague Mirko Ilić told Quartz in 2021. “Everything that mattered to him was here.”

The designer also had a personal connection to the World Trade Center. He’d designed much of the decor at Windows on the World, a restaurant complex that occupied the North Tower’s 106th and 107th floors. Restaurateur Joe Baum hired Glaser to create its iconic yellow-and-blue logo, menu and dinnerware patterns. Today, some of the dishes used at Windows are housed in the National September 11 Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. They survived the World Trade Center’s destruction because the restaurant’s owner had brought them home for a private event.

Glaser told the Daily News that he came up with “I ♥ NY More Than Ever” while reflecting on “the most powerful thing you can say about us, a city.” He added, “This blow has made us even stronger and more powerful in our passion for New York.”

In addition to publishing his updated logo in the Daily News, Glaser recruited students at the School of Visual Arts to distribute poster copies of the design. (One such handout is held in Cooper Hewitt’s collections.) The posters, which were soon plastered on storefronts and in public places across the city, served a dual purpose, reminding New Yorkers of the strength of their community and urging them to donate to charities supporting those affected by the attacks. A small line of text at the bottom of the page read, “Be generous. Your city needs you. This poster is not for sale.”

I Heart NY and Milton Glaser

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Glaser also collaborated with WNYC to raise funds to restore the radio station’s antenna, which was damaged during the attacks. Listeners who sent in a donation received a free poster—an arrangement that netted WNYC $190,000.

Bates says that the “I ♥ NY More Than Ever” campaign was illustrative of Glaser’s ongoing commitment to “connectedness.” Shortly before his death in June 2020 at age 91, the designer embarked on what would be his final project: a colorful reimagining of the word “Together,” with each letter given its own distinct style, created in response to “the divisiveness” of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bates adds.

As Glaser told the New York Times a few weeks before he died, “All we can do is have this sense that we are not alone.”

Meilan Solly is a senior associate digital editor at Smithsonian magazine, where she oversees the online history section and writes about everything from archaeology to the British royal family. Solly’s specialties are Tudor England, Renaissance and modern art, and World War II.