National Post (National Edition)
Graphic designer of I ‘heart’ New York
Milton Glaser, whose creation of the I ‘heart’ NY logo helped make him one of the most influential graphic designers of his generation, died in Manhattan on June 26, his 91st birthday, of complications from a stroke.
He was the only graphic designer to receive the National Medal of Arts, in 2010.
In 1966, Columbia Records hired him to design a poster for Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits LP. With more than six million copies printed, the poster of Dylan in silhouette with a mane of twisted, brightly coloured locks became an artifact of the psychedelic era. (Glaser also did posters for Mick Jagger, Aretha Franklin and Jerry Garcia.)
He also designed a poster for Broadway’s 1993 run of Pulitzer- and Tony-winning drama Angels in America.
In 1977, New York State launched a campaign to attract tourists and improve the morale of New Yorkers amid a crime wave and financial crisis. Glaser was to create 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.
Glaser’s other contribution to New York iconography was New York magazine, which he co-founded with editor Clay Felker in 1968; he went on to design hundreds of issues.
In it, Glaser co-wrote (with Jerome Snyder) The Underground Gourmet, a column about affordable restaurants, which helped shift attention to ethnic fare.
Glaser designed restaurant logos, menus and even interiors, including that of the Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center.
The son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary, Milton Glaser was born June 26, 1929.
At eight, he developed rheumatic fever and spent a year-long convalescence in bed. “Art had redeemed my life,” he told Believer magazine.
A Fulbright scholarship, after graduating Cooper Union in 1951, took Glaser to Italy, where he absorbed centuries of art history and studied with a painter of still-lifes so pared down they were considered revolutionary.
In 1957, he married Shirley Girton. She is his only immediate survivor.
Glaser donated his archives to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he had been acting board chair.
After 9/11, he created a variant of the I heart NY logo, featuring a wounded heart and the phrase, “I (heart) New York More Than Ever.”