Designer created ‘I love New York’ logo
NEW YORK — Milton Glaser, the groundbreaking graphic designer who adorned Bob Dylan’s silhouette with psychedelic hair and summed up the feelings for his native New York with “I (heart) NY,” died Friday, his 91st birthday. The cause was a stroke and Glaser had also had renal failure, his wife, Shirley Glaser, told the New York Times.
In posters, logos, advertisements and book covers, Glaser’s ideas captured the spirit of the 1960s with a few simple colours and shapes. He was the designer on the team that founded New York magazine with Clay Felker in the late 1960s.
“Around our office, of course, he will forever be one of the small team of men and women that, in the late Sixties, yanked New York out of the newspaper morgue and turned it into a great American magazine,” the magazine’s obituary of Glaser said.
Soon city magazines everywhere were sprouting and aping its simple, witty design style. When publishing titan Rupert Murdoch forced Felker and Glaser out of New York magazine in a hostile takeover in 1977, the staff walked out in solidarity with their departing editors, leaving an incomplete issue three days before it was due on newsstands.
Glaser’s 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.
He preferred not to use the term “art” at all. “What I’m suggesting is we eliminate the term art and call everything work,” Glaser told the Associated Press in 2000, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted an exhibit on his career. “When it’s really extraordinary and moves it in a certain way, we call it great work. We call it good when it accomplishes a task, and we call it bad when it misses a target.”
The bold “I (heart) NY” logo — cleverly using typewriter-style letters as the typeface — was dreamed up as part of an ad campaign begun in 1977 to boost the state’s image when crime and budget troubles dominated the headlines. Glaser did the design free of charge.
Nearly a quarter-century later, days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, he revised it, adding a dark scar to the red heart and “more than ever” to the message. Glaser had done design work for the restaurants at the destroyed World Trade Center complex.
His 1966 illustration of Dylan, his face a simple black silhouette but his hair sprouting in a riot of colours in curvilinear fashion, put in graphic form the 1960s philosophy that letting your hair fly free was a way to free your mind. (For Glaser, though, it wasn’t a drug inspired image — he said he borrowed from Marcel Duchamp and Islamic art.)
The poster was inserted in Dylan’s Greatest Hits album, so it made its way into the hands of millions of fans.
“It was a new use of the poster — a giveaway that was supposed to encourage people to buy the album,” Glaser told the New York Times in 2001. “Then it took on a life of its own, showing up in films, magazines, whatever. It did not die, as such forms of ephemera usually do.”
Among Glaser’s other noteworthy projects were cover illustrations for Signet paperback editions of Shakespeare; type designs such as Baby Teeth, first used on the Dylan poster, and Glaser Stencil; and a poster for the Mostly Mozart Festival featuring a colourful Mozart sneezing. His designs also inspired the playbill for Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.