Designer created famed N.Y. logo
Milton Glaser, the graphic designer, who has died on his 91st birthday, created the I ( Heart) NY logo, perhaps the most imitated motif of the postwar era.
New York in the early 1970s had a massive public- sector debt, while litter, graffiti and crime were on the rise. In a bid to revive tourism, William Doyle, deputy commissioner of the New York State department of commerce, oversaw a new marketing strategy featuring TV commercials with the slogan I love New York — and charged Glaser with the task of devising a logo.
Initially Glaser was not taken by the project. But one day in a taxi he hit on the idea of replacing the world “love” with the outline of a heart, and so created an icon of American pop culture.
Glaser made no money from the logo, which he had done pro bono, and in later life he came to resent the association of his name with a single project, pointing out that he had done “a lot of other work, much of which I think is more complex, more interesting and more worth talking about.”
In 1968 he co- founded New York magazine and, among other projects, was responsible for decorative graphics in restaurants on the top floors of the World Trade Center. Glaser’s posters hung at the Juilliard and in Carnegie Hall, and his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
He was born in the Bronx on June 26, 1929 to Hungarian Jewish parents. Bedbound for a year as a child, young Milton passed the time building miniature cities, and developed a passion for comic books.
At 12 he began taking weekend life classes and from 1943 attended New York’s High School of Music and Art, then the Cooper Union Art School. He gained a Fulbright scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, studying etching under Giorgio Morandi.
Back in New York, in 1954 Glaser co- founded Push Pin Studios and Push Pin Graphic, a magazine for friends and clients, which showcased brightly coloured designs for posters, record sleeves, book illustrations, magazine covers and advertisements.
From 1961 Glaser taught at New York School of Visual Arts. He came to widespread notice in 1966 with his insert design for Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, depicting the singer in silhouette, his hair a riot of curls. In 1968 Glaser worked as design director with Clay Felker on the launch of New York magazine and co-wrote The Underground Gourmet restaurant column.