Milton Glaser, the groundbreaking graphic designer who adorned Bob Dylan’s silhouette with psychedelic hair and summed up feelings for his native New York with “I (HEART) NY”, died on Friday (June 26), his 91st birthday.
The cause was a stroke, and Glaser had also had kidney failure, said his wife, Shirley Glaser. The New York Times.
On posters, logos, advertisements, and book covers, Glaser’s ideas captured the spirit of the 1960s with some simple colors and shapes. He was the designer of the team that founded New York magazine with Clay Felker in the late 60s.
“Around our office, of course, he will always be one of the small team of men and women who, in the late 1960s, pulled New York out of the newspaper morgue and turned it into a great American magazine,” says the magazine obituary. Glaser said.
Soon, city magazines everywhere were springing up and mimicking his simple and witty design style. By publishing the titan, Rupert Murdoch forced Felker and Glaser to leave New York The magazine, in a hostile acquisition in 1977, staff withdrew in solidarity with their departing editors, leaving an incomplete problem three days before it came out on the newsstands.
“We have caused, however small, a change in people’s visual habits,” he said. The Washington Post in 1969. “Television conditions people to demand imagination.”
But he said he had to work to keep his style fresh.
“There is enormous pressure to repeat past successes. That is certain death. Referring to a beloved 1960s design motif, he added that he couldn’t make another rainbow “if my life depended on it.”
His pictorial sense was so profound, and his designs so influential, that his works in later years were preserved by collectors and studied as fine art.
But he preferred not to use the term “art” at all.
“What I suggest is that we remove the term art and that everything works,” Glaser said in a Associated Press Interview in 2000, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized an exhibition about his career. “When it’s really extraordinary and it moves it in a certain way, we call it a great job. We call it good when it performs a task, and we call it bad when a goal fails. ”
The bold “I (HEART) NY” logo, which cleverly used typewriter-style letters as the typeface, was devised as part of an advertising campaign launched in 1977 to boost the state’s image when crime and trouble Budgets dominated the headlines. Glaser did the design for free.
Almost a quarter of a century later, a few days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, he revised it, adding a dark scar to the red heart and “more than ever” to the message.
“I woke up on Wednesday morning and said, ‘God, I have to do something to answer this,'” he said. The New York Times. “When you have a heart attack, part of your heart dies. When you recover, part of your heart is gone, but the people in your life become much more important and there is a greater awareness of the value of things. “
Glaser had actually done design work for the restaurants at the destroyed World Trade Center complex.
His 1966 illustration of Dylan, his face was a simple black silhouette but his hair was sprouting in a riot of colors in a curvilinear shape, he graphically put the sixties philosophy that letting your hair fly was a way to free your mind . (For him, however, it was not a drug-inspired image: he said he borrowed from Marcel Duchamp and Islamic art.)
The poster was inserted into Dylan’s Great Successes album, so it reached the hands of millions of fans.
“It was a new use for the poster, a gift that was supposed to encourage people to buy the album,” said Glaser. The New York Times in 2001. “Then it took on a life of its own, appearing in movies, magazines, whatever. She did not die, as those ephemeral forms usually do. “
Among Glaser’s other notable projects were the cover illustrations for Shakespeare’s Sigkes pocket editions; typographic designs such as Baby Teeth, first used on Dylan’s poster, and Glaser Stencil; and a poster for the Most Mozart Festival with a colorful Mozart sneeze. His designs also inspired the playbill for Tony Kushner Angels in america.
Glaser was born in 1929 in the Bronx and studied at Cooper Union School of Art in New York and in Italy.
In 1954, he co-founded the innovative graphic design firm Push Pin Studios with Seymour Chwast and others. He stayed with him for 20 years before founding his own company.
He was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in 2004. In 2009, he received the National Medal of Arts.
“I just like doing everything, and I was always interested to see how far I could go to push the limits,” he said.
