Milton Glaser
The New Yorker who put a heart in front of "I ❤ NY" and spent sixty years proving that graphic design could be generous, funny, and socially serious all at once.
Milton Glaser was the most widely recognised American graphic designer of the twentieth century — not because he invented a system or founded a school, but because he produced a stream of images, from the Bob Dylan poster to the I ❤ NY logo, that entered everyday culture as common property. He worked until the day he died, on his ninetieth birthday.
Formation
Glaser grew up in the Bronx and studied at Cooper Union in New York, graduating in 1951. A Fulbright scholarship took him to Bologna, where he studied printmaking under Giorgio Morandi — an encounter that gave him a lasting respect for the expressive weight of a single drawn line. He returned to New York in 1954 and co-founded Push Pin Studios with Seymour Chwast, Ed Sorel, and Reynold Ruffins. The studio's visual approach — historicist, eclectic, illustrational, willing to play — ran counter to the Swiss rationalism then dominating American corporate design, and it proved enormously influential.
The Defining Works
The 1966 Bob Dylan poster — a silhouette in profile, psychedelic hair rendered as a pattern of flat colour borrowed from Islamic tile work and Art Nouveau — was included as an insert in Dylan's Greatest Hits album. Estimates suggest several million copies were distributed, making it one of the most widely seen graphic images of the decade.
In 1975 Glaser designed the I ❤ NY logo for a New York State Department of Commerce campaign. It is arguable that no other piece of graphic design has been reproduced more often or more widely appropriated. Glaser himself drew it in the back of a taxi on a scrap of red crayon, reportedly believing the campaign would run for a few months.1 He received no royalties for it and donated the rights.
Later landmarks included the design of New York magazine (co-founded with Clay Felker, 1968), the DC Comics logo (revised 1977), and the Brooklyn Brewery identity (1988).
Method and Range
Glaser resisted any single style. He drew with equal facility from Art Deco, Cubism, Renaissance illustration, and vernacular American commercial art. His studio practice was characterised by curiosity rather than consistency: he designed restaurant interiors, wine labels, book jackets, theatre posters, and environmental graphics alongside editorial and identity work. Teaching — he taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York for decades — was central to how he understood his role.
| Work | Year | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Bob Dylan poster | 1966 | Fulbright/psychedelic revival |
| New York magazine | 1968 | Co-founded with Clay Felker |
| I ❤ NY logo | 1975 | NY State tourism campaign |
| DC Comics logo | 1977 | Revised identity |
| Brooklyn Brewery logo | 1988 | Brand identity |
There are three responses to a piece of design — yes, no, and WOW. Wow is the one to aim for.
Footnotes
- The "taxi and red crayon" origin story is reported consistently in Glaser's own interviews and in Heller's biography. ↩
