Above: One of the most memorable, and adored pieces of graphic design ever created, courtesy of Milton Glaser.

The piece can be displayed horizontal as it is above, or stacked 2x2 as commonly found on many a white T-shirt. The typeface is a very soft, yet mechanically serifed face, reminiscent of Ink that has bled onto paper after being stroked by a slug from a typewriter. Despite the superficial imperfections that have been built into the piece, upon close inspection, it is very well-kerned, and seems to have taken quite a bit of planning in regards to its composition. The heart that seperates the I from the NY is a contrasting heart, not only by the psychoactive bright red that it is coloured in, but also the round, and perfectly clean edges that are nothing like the typeface that surrounds it.

Just being able to read the design message as "I love New York" reveals just how heavily encoded this symbol really is in North American culture since the reader must recognize the text as an acronym, then translate the heart symbol as "love", and NY as "New York." —I love New York abstracted and simplified in to 3 letters and a symbol. Further associations between the graphic and the place of which it denotes can further be read into the choice of typeface Glaser has chosen to use. Cultural meanings can be dervied from "typewriter" looking faces which allude to paper, papers being pushed in businesses, businesses being related commerce, American Commerce to the Wall Street, or similar associations to papers fresh from typewriters of newsrooms from the NYTimes etc...

—Brian Gerard Elicierto