This must be the month of copywrongs: New York coffee-lover Sam Penix, who tattooed his coffee shop’s logo on his hand, received the following letter from the legal agency representing New York State:
Everyman Espresso’s unauthorized and confusingly similar use of the I ♥ NY® logo” violated federal trademark law and implied “a misleading designation of source, origin, endorsement, sponsorship or approval by the New York State Department of Economic Development of your merchandise.”
What a way to punish a man celebrating the very love of his city that the logo was designed to celebrate in the first place.
Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that iconic graphic designer Milton Glaser, who created the I ♥ NY identity in 1977, has famously never seen a cent in royalties.
“It’s amazing to me that the once-gritty cross-section of neighborhoods is now international, something admired in Paris.”
Legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, best-known for creating the famous I ♥ NY logo, on Brooklyn’s renaissance upon the 25th anniversary of his iconic Brooklyn Brewery identity.
That’s the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears.
There’s nothing more exciting than seeing someone whose life has been affected in a positive way by something you’ve said. There’s nothing more exciting than to see somebody change from a sort of condition of inertness or inattentiveness into a mind that begins to inquire about meaning.
I think if you don’t do something to project into the future that way, the possibility for total self-absorption and narcissism becomes very much greater.
If you can sustain your interest in what you’re doing, you’re an extremely fortunate person. What you see very frequently in people’s professional lives, and perhaps in their emotional life as well, is that they lose interest in the third act. You sort of get tired, and indifferent, and, sometimes, defensive. And you kind of lose your capacity for astonishment — and that’s a great loss, because the world is a very astonishing place.
What I feel fortunate about is that I’m still astonished, that things still amaze me. And I think that’s the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears, where you basically have to admit you never learn it.
A characteristic of artistic education is for people to tell you that you’re a genius. […] So everybody gets this idea, if you go to art school, that you’re really a genius. Sadly, it isn’t true. Genius occurs very rarely. So the real embarrassing issue about failure is your own acknowledgement that you’re not a genius, that you’re not as good as you thought you were. […] There’s only one solution: You must embrace failure. You must admit what is. You must find out what you’re capable of doing, and what you’re not capable of doing. That is the only way to deal with the issue of success and failure because otherwise you simply would never subject yourself to the possibility that you’re not as good as you want to be, hope to be, or as others think you are.
