Milton Glaser, Master Designer of ‘I ♥ NY’ Logo, Is Dead at 91
He was also a founder of New York magazine, created a memorable Bob Dylan poster and produced designs for everything from supermarkets to restaurants to “Mad Men.”
Read on for excerpts from NYT and a link to some lesser known interesting facts about Milton Glaser. A wonderful cultural contributor on all levels.
Milton Glaser in his Manhattan studio in 2012. He brought wit, whimsy, narrative and skilled drawing to commercial art | Robert Wright for The New York Times
From the NYT By William Grimes | Published June 26, 2020 Updated June 28, 2020
Milton Glaser, a graphic designer who changed the vocabulary of American visual culture in the 1960s and ’70s with his brightly colored, extroverted posters, magazines, book covers and record sleeves, notably his 1967 poster of Bob Dylan with psychedelic hair and his “I ♥ NY” logo, died on Friday, his 91st birthday, in Manhattan.
His wife and only immediate survivor, Shirley Glaser, said the cause was a stroke. He also had renal failure.
Mr. Glaser brought wit, whimsy, narrative and skilled drawing to commercial art at a time when advertising was dominated by the severe strictures of modernism on one hand and the cozy realism of magazines like The Saturday Evening Post on the other.
At Push Pin Studios, which he and several former Cooper Union classmates formed in 1954, he opened up design to myriad influences and styles that began to grab the attention of magazines and advertising agencies, largely through the studio’s influential promotional publication, the Push Pin Almanack (later renamed Push Pin Monthly Graphic).
“We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence,” Mr. Glaser, who designed more than 400 posters over the course of his career, said in an interview for the book “The Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration” (2004).
“Art Nouveau, Chinese wash drawing, German woodcuts, American primitive paintings, the Viennese secession and cartoons of the ’30s were an endless source of inspiration,” he added. “All the things that the doctrine of orthodox modernism seemed to have contempt for — ornamentation, narrative illustration, visual ambiguity — attracted us.””
Nearly six million posters featuring Mr. Glaser’s psychedelic Bob Dylan design made their way into homes across the world. Credit | Milton Glaser
1968 Olivetti ad designed by Milton Glaser
Mr. Glaser delighted in combining visual elements and stylistic motifs from far-flung sources. For a 1968 ad for Olivetti, he modified a 15th-century painting by Piero di Cosimo showing a mourning dog and inserted the Italian company’s latest portable typewriter at the feet of the dead nymph in the original artwork.
For the Dylan poster, a promotional piece included in the 1967 album “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits,” he created a simple outline of the singer’s head, based on a black-and-white self-portrait silhouette by Marcel Duchamp, and added thick, wavy bands of color for the hair, forms he imported from Islamic art.
Nearly six million posters made their way into homes across the world. Endlessly reproduced, the image became one of the visual signatures of the era.
“I ♥ NY,” his logo for a 1977 campaign to promote tourism in New York State, achieved even wider currency. Sketched on the back of an envelope with red crayon during a taxi ride, it was printed in black letters in a chubby typeface, with a cherry-red heart standing in for the word “love.” Almost immediately, the logo became an instantly recognized symbol of New York City, as recognizable as the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty.
“I’m flabbergasted by what happened to this little, simple nothing of an idea,” Mr. Glaser told The Village Voice in 2011.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, T-shirts emblazoned with the logo sold in the thousands, as visitors to the city seized on it as a way of expressing solidarity. Mr. Glaser designed a modified version — “I ♥ NY More Than Ever,” with a dark bruise on the heart — which was distributed as a poster throughout the city and reproduced on the front and back pages of The Daily News on Sept. 19.
Milton Glaser
Milton Glaser was born on June 26, 1929, in the Bronx, to Eugene and Eleanor (Bergman) Glaser, immigrants from Hungary. His father owned a dry-cleaning and tailoring shop; his mother was a homemaker.
When Milton was a young boy, an older cousin drew a bird on the side of a paper bag to amuse him. “Suddenly, I almost fainted with the realization that you could create life with a pencil,” he told Inc. magazine in 2014. “And at that moment, I decided that’s how I was going to spend my life.”
He took drawing classes with Raphael and Moses Soyer, the social realist artists, before enrolling in the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts). After twice failing the entrance exam for Pratt Institute, he worked at a package-design company before being accepted by the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
Mr. Glaser in 1974. He said he was “flabbergasted” by the success of his New York logo, which became an instantly recognized symbol | Milton Glaser Studio
While at the Cooper Union, he and three classmates — Seymour Chwast, Edward Sorel and Reynold Ruffins — rented part of a loft in Greenwich Village and created a company, Design Plus. They completed one project: cork place mats with a silk-screened design, which they sold to Wanamaker’s department store.
In a classic study on trauma, subjects wrote about their traumatic experiences for 15 minutes a day. Those who were able to find meaning from their experiences reported less stress, more positive moods and fewer illnesses than subjects who simply wrote about their everyday experiences.
“The pandemic can create an opening for us to emerge from it with a heightened sense of purpose,” Ms. Marston said, adding, “as well as increased compassion for the struggles of others.” Again, this doesn’t mean being naïve or insufferably positive about current events. “But when we approach this challenge with confidence or hope, we’re likely to do better and be able to transform difficult experiences into important lessons,” she said.
We also think you might enjoy reading some little known facts about Mr. Glaser. Did you know he also designed children’s books? It’s true and you can learn about that and more right here.
DC Comics Logo designed by . . . Milton Glaser!