Milton Glaser, designer of iconic NY logo, dies
Bob Dylan poster also recognized as famed creativity
Milton Glaser, who created the iconic I ♥ NY logo in 1977, died Friday in New York City on his 91st birthday.
Glaser was already an accomplished designer and a co-founder of New York magazine when he came up with I ♥ NY. His poster of Bob Dylan, created in 1967 with Dylan’s face in silhouette and his curly hair portrayed with a rainbow of colors, was in households across America because it was included in the singer’s greatest hits album.
Glaser came up with the I ♥ NY in the back of a taxi. In a video for Guardian Culture made in 2015, the artist said he had already submitted a logo design to the city’s tourism commission for a multimillion -dollar campaign. But a new idea “occurred in a f lash.” During a time when people were leaving the city in droves, Glaser said, he wanted something that would say, “I’m going to stay.”
“Design very often demands an interval between seeing and understanding,” Glaser said. “This happens to be a puzzle everybody solves immediately and because of that, it stays in the memory.”
I ♥ NY, with its concise shape, typewriter font and broad red heart, is as familiar as Mcdonald’s arches, the Nike swoosh, Apple’s apple. Its familiarity fires our synapses to collect dozens of images, memories and references in seconds.
According to a New York Times obituary, Glaser was born in 1929 in the Bronx, to immigrants from Hungary. His father owned a dry-cleaning and tailoring shop; his mother was a homemaker. Glaser decided at a young age he wanted to be an artist and attended the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan and then the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
Glaser worked with famous brands as well as lesser-known companies. In the mid-1970s, the owner of the Grand Union supermarkets hired him to rebrand the stores. The block letters of Grand Union with the red dot in the center, familiar to Capital Region and North Country residents of a certain age – were Glaser’s work.
In 2007, Glaser created a new logo for the city of Glens Falls, inspired by the windows in the city’s historic architecture. He also created a series of posters, all featuring black-andwhite dairy cows, for the Cooperstown Summer Music Festival. In 2009, he was the first graphic designer to receive the National Medal of Arts.
In 2012, Glaser’s work was featured at Sage College’s Opalka Gallery and Rathbone Hall. The exhibit was called “In Search of the Miraculous: Or, One Thing Leads to Another,” also the title of one of Glaser’s books. He said to reporter Joseph Dalton at the time about I ♥ NY, “The thing outshadows everything else I’ve done. There’s nothing I can ever do that will get the publicity or circulation. It just seemed inevitable, but it may also be the most banal thing I’ve ever done.”
He also struggled with the push and pull of “the magic of art and the leading nature of advertising,” saying, “one of the problems of being a graphic artist is that at its core it’s based on the service of capitalism. It’s purposeful, and therefore you share the client’s objective. But art is not purposeful. It’s about commonality, making people have something in common. Those things can’t be reconciled.”
But for people whose job is to attract tourists to the state, I ♥ NY is a reliable mainstay.
“It’s an iconic logo, synonymous with NYS and tourism,” said Jill Delaney, president and CEO of Discover Albany, the county’s convention and visitors bureau. “It’s been duplicated so may times it’s clear, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”