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.”
by William Grimes | New York Times
June 26, 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.”
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I can remember worshiping and admiring his work when I was in art school in 1974. The Dylan poster is most memorable.
Just ran across a couple of photos of Milton Glaser that I took in 1989 at the AIGA National Conference in San Antonio, TX.
Got to meet him, participated in a conference discussion with him (we got into an argument, but that’s another story).
These shots are in the evening when dining/entertaining going on.
Nice shots.
Brilliant design, instantly recognisable...simple, clean, uncluttered, but bam! impact...visionary.
His iconic I Love NY logo is a classic example...so simple, so brilliant.
Have you read the 'The Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration' book Wadcorp?...I'm actually thinking of getting this. If you have read it, is it worth buying, in your opinion?