My design hero: Milton Glaser

I’ve been a big fan of Milton Glaser ever since I heard him talk at the launch of his book ‘Art is Work in London’ in 2001. What I love about him and his work is that it is so diverse, is he a graphic designer or artist? When asked by Design Boom “When you were a child, did you want to become a graphic designer?” He answered “I always wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t know what a graphic designer was. I suppose that among the earliest things I ever did as a child was to copy comic strips.” This resonates with me as I didn’t really know or understand what graphic design was I just knew that I wanted to do art.

A brief history

Born in New York in 1929, Milton Glaser is an important American graphic designer who founded Push Pin Studios (in 1954) in New York where he worked with Seymour Chwast. He left in 1970 and founded Milton Glaser Inc in New York in 1974. His work is bold, iconic and nearly always has an idea behind it. It really captures the essence of thoughtful creativity to deliver strong designs.

One of his most iconic designs is the New York City logo from 1977 set in ITC American Typewriter. I found his original sketch on his website, I love to see the sketches and ideas behind the final artwork, and then how it is received in the outside world.

Typefaces

And his typefaces are just truly wonderful, a mix of my favourite things, bold, geometric and playful. And one of my typefaces has been inspired by his ‘Milton Glaser Babyteeth 1968’

The art of the poster

His posters from the 60s are an exciting explosion of colour. I love his illustrative use of type and colour combinations, and the ideas behind them are so strong. My favourites are the editorial artwork about skin conditions for Seventeen magazine, from 1971.

Art is Work

This brilliant book ‘Art is Work’ by Milton Glaser is what made me fall in love with not only his work but also his ethos on creativity and design. I wish I’d got him to sign it after his talk but I was just too shy. Since then it’s always been my mission to meet my design heroes (if I can).

“Work is essential to people’s lives. To do work that is meaningful and excellent seems a fundamental desire of the best human beings. If we assume that art is a form of work, it becomes more related to our daily life.”

Milton Glaser

Commercial design

As a graphic designer, I also love his more commercial work. It has a real sense of purpose and really is good design, from his striking Sesame Street experience to the supermarket work he did for Grand Union. I’ve spent the last 20 years concentrating on commercial design, mainly in the retail sector and the last 5 working on my art alongside. So it’s refreshing to see as a designer you can flex the different aspects of your creative brain. I also love his thoughts to working with clients.

“There are three responses to a piece of design; yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.”

Milton Glaser

I love this statement from Milton Glaser, when asked by Design Boom in May 2004, to describe his style, like a good friend of his would describe it:

“Its most striking character is its randomness, its range, very often you could not say that the job was done by me, because there are jobs that require the absence of style, as well as those that require the presence of style. as a graphic designer my work is characterized more by drawings. more than many of my contemporaries I love to draw, love to illustrate, make pictures. for us who came out of the history of modernism, it might not be the appropriate way to work. perhaps it is just not a comfortable way to work. what I want to say is that it would be hard for somebody looking at the range of things that I do to see a persistent pattern in them, except in the realm of drawing and illustration… where the choice of colors and forms are more obviously personal. I have the idea that there isn’t any truth in style. it’s very temporal, bound to the moment that we live in and the way we see things. if it’s useful to you, fine, if not you move on to something else”