He brought ingenuity, fantasy, narrative, and skillful drawings to commercial art at a time when advertising was dominated by the severe restrictions of modernism on the one hand and the welcoming realism of magazines like The Saturday Evening Post on the other.
And at Push Pin Studios, which he and several former Cooper Union classmates formed in 1954, Mr. Glaser opened the design to countless influences and styles that began to attract the attention of magazines and advertising agencies.
Glaser died Friday, his 91st birthday, in Manhattan. His wife, Shirley Glaser, said the cause was a stroke. She also had kidney failure.
[[[[Read the complete obituary for William Grimes of The Times.]
He was born on June 26, 1929 in the Bronx. As a child, he took drawing classes with Raphael and Moses Soyer, the social realist artists, before enrolling in what is now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia College of Music, Art and Performing Arts. He graduated from Cooper Union in 1951 and married Shirley Girton in 1957.
His “I ♥ NY” logo was created for a 1977 campaign to promote tourism in New York State. Drawn on the back of an envelope with a red crayon during a taxi ride, it was printed in black letters in a chubby typeface, with a cherry red heart representing the word “love”. The logo became an instantly recognized symbol of New York City.
“I am amazed at what happened to this simple little idea,” Glaser told The Village Voice in 2011.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, T-shirts printed with the logo sold by the thousands, when visitors to the city took advantage of it as a way to express solidarity. 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.
