Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser was born in the Bronx in 1929 to Hungarian Jewish immigrants. He studied at Cooper Union in the late 1940s and won a Fulbright fellowship to study etching under Giorgio Morandi in Bologna in 1952. That grounding in fine-art printmaking — and specifically in Morandi’s discipline of infinite variation on a narrow vocabulary — stayed with him for the rest of his career.

In 1954 Glaser returned to New York and co-founded Push Pin Studios with fellow Cooper Union graduates Seymour Chwast, Ed Sorel and Reynold Ruffins. Push Pin became the counterweight to the European modernism arriving through Unimark and Vignelli. Where the modernists insisted on Helvetica and the grid, Push Pin drew from Art Nouveau, Victorian ephemera, American folk art and contemporary illustration. It is the studio that made American editorial design feel specifically American.

In 1968 Glaser co-founded New York magazine with Clay Felker, serving as its president and design director for nearly a decade. The magazine’s visual language — witty covers, expressive typography, strong illustration — shaped the template for every city magazine that followed.

In 1974 Glaser left New York and established Milton Glaser Inc. Three years later he donated the I ♥ NY logo to the state during the city’s fiscal crisis. The mark became one of the most recognisable pieces of graphic design ever made; Glaser was never paid for it and refused to claim royalties when asked.

He taught at the School of Visual Arts from 1961 until his death, and in 2009 became the first graphic designer to receive the US National Medal of Arts. He died in Manhattan on his 91st birthday in 2020, still working.

Glaser’s position was that design is an act of translation. The designer’s job is to move an idea from a client’s head into a public context, and the specific tools of the move — type, colour, illustration, composition — have to serve the idea, not the designer’s personal style.

“There are three responses to a piece of design: yes, no, and wow. Wow is the one to aim for.” — Milton Glaser

He was unusually articulate about the ethics of the profession. In a 2001 lecture at AIGA he published Ten Things I Have Learned, a widely circulated list that ranks “You can only work for people that you like” and “Less is not necessarily more” against the received modernist wisdom of the time. He was sceptical of purely formal argument and interested in the social and emotional function of graphic objects.

“Drawing is thinking.” — Milton Glaser, Drawing is Thinking (2008)

He drew constantly, and insisted that students draw constantly. For Glaser, the ability to draw by hand was inseparable from the ability to think visually — not because computer tools were bad, but because the mechanical act of drawing made the brain notice relationships it otherwise skipped.

His eclectic visual vocabulary — Art Nouveau curves, Persian miniature decoration, comic-strip directness, Bauhaus type discipline — was the opposite of Vignelli’s six-typeface restraint. Both positions were serious. Graphic design needed both.

Glaser’s influence is unusually broad because he practised across the full range of American graphic-design disciplines: illustration, editorial, identity, signage, pro-bono public service, writing and teaching. His lineage runs through every Push Pin Studios designer (Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis, James McMullan) and through six decades of School of Visual Arts graduates.

He is probably the most-widely-taught American graphic designer of the second half of the twentieth century. Ten Things I Have Learned appears on design-school reading lists alongside the Vignelli Canon and Thoughts on Design — the three forming a kind of ethical core curriculum for the discipline.

The I ♥ NY mark has outgrown its author in a way that few other works in the field have. It has been copied onto every city wordmark since. Glaser redrew it once, as I ♥ NY More Than Ever, in the days after 11 September 2001 — adding a small black smudge to the heart — and the Daily News printed it as a poster to be pulled from the paper and taped to windows.

His death in 2020 was treated as a national event, which for a graphic designer is itself part of the legacy.