Milton Glaser
Nearly all Americans today are familiar with Milton Glaser’s work as one of the pivotal figures in postwar graphic design and illustration. Born in the Bronx, and educated at Cooper Union and Bologna, Italy under a Fulbright grant to study with the painter Giorgio Morandi, Glaser is a profoundly influential master of communication, as well as a charismatic mentor and humanistic force for social change. His work is characterized by its masterful handwork, its love of storytelling, and its sense of joy. Glaser sees form making as “humankind’s most life-enhancing gift.”
Milton Glaser’s career spans more than fifty years and includes logos, ads, posters, portraits, newspapers, magazines, books, exhibitions, grocery stores and restaurants. In 1954, he co-founded Push Pin studios, partly to provide an alternative view of design to the then prevailing post-Bauhaus ideology. Characterized by humor, narration, decoration, historicism and parody, Push Pin’s work was showcased at the Musee des Artes Decorative at the Louvre and subsequently emulated around the world. In 1968, he co-founded New York Magazine, which became the prototype for city magazines and service journalism across the country. Among his other iconic works include the album cover for Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, the interiors for Windows on the World and the Rainbow Room, logos for Angels in America and the World Health Organization (the international AIDS symbol) and the world-famous I Love NY logo (post September 11th transformed into I Love NY More Than Ever).