I♥NY & The Most Interesting Man in the World

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I am a second-rate wife. I went to NYC without Don, visited our daughter and her husband, lived large, and all I brought home to The Most Interesting Man in the World was this t-shirt from the Laguardia airport gift shop for losers like me who didn't purchase a more $ignificant gift on 5th Avenue. Don really is very interesting (ok, stupid understatement, there is nothing the man has not attempted to do in his lifetime), but calling him The Most Interesting Man in the World is what our son started, because Don resembles the man from the Dos Equis XX beer ads. If you go to that link in the last sentence, you can watch videos of the ads. I ♥ them. The narrator makes statements about The Most Interesting man, such as,

XX His charm is so contagious, vaccines have been created for it.

XX He is the only man to ever ace the Rorschach test.

XX Alien abductors have asked him to probe them.

XX Even his enemies list him as their emergency contact number.

To illustrate the resemblance, Don is here in the top photo, below, at Lesley & Brian's wedding last summer, and the other World's Most Interesting Man below him. (The actor is Jonathan Goldsmith, but he looks a little like another interesting man, Maximilian Schell, don't you think?)

The police often question him, just because they find him interesting.

"Stay thirsty, my friends."

Maximilian Schell: "It's your most endearing quality." - Topkapi

But the real point of this post was supposed to be an even more successful ad campaign.

I ♥ N Y

Maybe I am not such a big loser for buying Don this t-shirt, because after I got back from NY I started following the Sartorialist blog, which is chic and cool, and he posted a pic of a trendy guy in a I♥NY t-shirt in his May 21 post on Moscow Men. Basically I don't think this tourism promo logo has gone out of style ever since it was created by Milton Glaser for the failing, flailing state of NY in 1977. I started wondering if I♥NY was the start of the whole "I ♥" thing. It was. Thanks to Google I found other stuff:

♥ This logo is a rebus. A rebus is a word puzzle using pictures to represent words, or parts of words. It was gr8 to find that out.
♥ The type face is a slab serif called American Typewriter. Is that the same as courier?
♥ Milton Glaser also designed the famous psychedelic Bob Dylan poster for CBS records in 1966.
♥ Milton Glaser co-founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968.
♥ The Director of the New York Department of Commerce, William S. Doyle hired ad agency Wells Rich Greene to help rejuvenate New York's damaged image in 1977. But then, Doyle got the great designer Milton Glaser to design the logo, which he didn't think was any big deal, and he did it for free. We're talking about maybe the most successful and imitated logo in the history of advertising.
♥ The state of New York is currently in such a crisis financially that they are begging ad agencies for free 30-second ads to rekindle the I LOVE NEW YORK campaign.
♥ Milton Glaser modified the logo after 9/11, like this:

Question: When you see I ♥ N Y do you say "I love NY" ? Or do you say "I heart NY"? I say "I love NY".

The Most Interesting Man in the World does not love NY, or heart NY. He might feel relatively neutral about NY. In fact, it's probably more like -





Info found at:
Wiki
Gotham Gazette
ragnewyork
ezinearticles.com