Creator of ‘I ❤ New York’ logo
Milton Glaser’s creation of the I heart NY logo, as well as hundreds of other projects, helped make him one of the most influential graphic designers of his generation
In a career spanning six decades, Glaser, who died on his birthday, aged 91, lent his talents to books, periodicals and posters – the usual province of graphic designers – as well as to films, restaurant interiors and public artworks.
With editor Clay Felker, he co-founded
New York magazine in 1968 and went on to design hundreds of issues that ‘‘established the format for the now-ubiquitous city magazine’’, said Michael Bierut, a prominent New York graphic designer.
However, Glaser’s renown rested foremost on the I heart NY motif, which was adapted, with slight modifications, around the world. ‘‘People everywhere were anxious to say, ‘I love something’, ’’ he said in a 2019 interview.
So popular was the formulation that it became a kind of logo for the Bronx-born Glaser himself. With a deep voice, precise elocution and extraordinary powers of description, he served as a de facto spokesman for his profession. He was the only graphic designer to receive the National Medal of Arts, bestowed on him by President Barack Obama in 2010.
‘‘At a time when European designers, especially in Switzerland, were defining the terms of vanguard design, Milton Glaser helped launch an alternative ethos rooted in American pop culture and counterculture,’’ said Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. ‘‘His more personal, narrative and permissive design philosophy itself became a worldwide phenomenon.’’
One of Glaser’s most important early commissions came in 1966, when Columbia Records hired him to design a poster to be packaged with the Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
LP. He created a silhouette of Dylan with a mane of twisted, brightly coloured locks. More than 6 million copies were printed, making the poster a signature artefact of the ‘‘psychedelic era’’. (Glaser later designed posters for such entertainers as Mick Jagger, Aretha Franklin and Jerry Garcia.)
Glaser traced the origins of the Dylan design to a Marcel Duchamp self-portrait from the 1950s and the jewel-like colours of Islamic art.
In 1977, the New York State Department of Commerce launched an ad campaign to attract tourists and, not incidentally, improve the morale of New Yorkers amid a crime wave and financial crisis that had New York City teetering on bankruptcy. Glaser was tasked with creating a logo to accompany the state’s new slogan: ‘‘I love New York.’’
He drew the original logo, with a heart in place of the word ‘‘love’’, in the back of a taxi. That drawing, in red crayon on a scrap of paper, is now housed in the Museum of Modern Art. Glaser received a nominal fee, which he accepted because he expected the campaign to last, at most, a few months. ‘‘There was a sense of desperation, despair, and also impotence that follows these kinds of conditions,’’ he told the New York Times in 2008.
‘‘It is one of those peculiarities of your own life where you don’t know the consequences of your own actions. Who in the world would have thought that this silly little bit of ephemera would become one of the most pervasive images of the 20th century?’’
Glaser’s other seminal contribution to New York iconography was the magazine he founded with Felker. His ‘‘densely packed layouts and illustrated ‘best-of’ listicles,’ ’’ Bierut noted, ‘‘became the visual corollary to the brand of urban service journalism that Felker pioneered.’’
The son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary who ran a dry cleaning business, Milton Glaser was raised in a Bronx housing complex dubbed Little Moscow for its population of Leftists.
Some residents were labour and civil rights activists who championed racially integrated housing.
He later said that growing up amid that ferment was ‘‘like heaven’’ during the Great Depression. ‘‘You had this enormous commitment to the idea of human possibility, that you didn’t have to just accept existing conditions, you could change yourself and change society.’’
At 8, he developed rheumatic fever and spent a year-long convalescence in bed. He passed the time creating an entire city of figurines from the pounds of clay his mother brought him. ‘‘Art had redeemed my life,’’ he told Believer magazine, ‘‘because I was never bored for a minute that whole year.’’
As the years passed, young Milton became known for his ability to draw almost anything, as well as for his entrepreneurial instincts; he sketched naked women for older boys for a nickel apiece.
He studied at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan, for which he later designed a logo, pro bono. With letters arranged on a musical staff, it was, he said, the only logo in the world that could be sung.
In 1951, after graduating from Manhattan’s Cooper Union, a Fulbright scholarship took him to Italy, where he absorbed centuries of art history and studied with Giorgio Morandi, a painter of still-lifes so pared down they were considered revolutionary. ‘‘It shifted me from modernism as the only resource to draw on,’’ he said. ‘‘History was not the enemy. You could use anything as raw material to make something.’’
Returning to New York, Glaser had to decide whether to pursue fine art or commercial art – a distinction he eventually helped erode. He settled on commercial art because, ‘‘I wanted to do work that was public. I wanted to do work that was on the street. I wanted to do work that people saw.’’
From 1954 to 1974, Glaser ran Push Pin Studios, which, he said, ‘‘celebrated all the things that the modernists taught us to hate’’.
When he felt his output became repetitive, Glaser disbanded the studio. ‘‘Push Pin had become a style and I don’t trust style.’’
From 1968 to 1977, he devoted much of his time to New York magazine. In 1983, he and Walter Bernard, another prominent designer, opened a publication design firm called WBMG. They designed or redesigned scores of publications, including The Washington Post, the Village Voice, Esquire, Paris Match and the
Brazilian newspaper O Globo, efforts chronicled in a 2019 book, by Glaser and Bernard, called Mag Men.
In 1957, he married Shirley Girton, an artist, author and gallery director. She is his only immediate survivor.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he created a variant of the I heart NY logo featuring a wounded heart and the phrase, ‘‘I [heart] New York More Than Ever.’’