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- Jun 26, 2019
- 2 min
Happy Birthday: Milton Glaser Turns 90
Today Milton Glaser celebrates his 90th birthday — a milestone to be sure, but not just a chronological one. Of even greater importance is the stunning impact that all the continuous years of creative productivity has had and continues to have on art and design. Yes, he’s still creating a wide range of, well, just about everything. The SVA Milton Glaser Archive (and this video about the Archive) testifies to his incomparable and incredible legacy. Making Magazine Magic To ack
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- Jun 24, 2019
- 9 min
A New York State of Design: How NYC Became the Design Capital of the World
Location, location: How did the Big Apple become the world’s premier design hub—and does it still hold the title? The fantasy goes something like this: You arrive in New York City and start at the bottom, and eventually become partner at a prestigious firm; you open your own firm; you design for a large publishing house; you work in-house for a Fortune 100 company; you break into the comic book industry as a successful illustrator and expand your client base to become a freel
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- Sep 19, 2018
- 1 min
Landscapes by Glaser
When one thinks of Milton Glaser, many media, graphic and drawing styles come to mind. But most of us do not think of landscapes. Start thinking! The Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center has opened an exhibition from September 7 – November 4, 2018 of landscape prints that he has been doing for a number of years. The opportunity to exhibit in Edward Hopper’s home is apt. The employ of light is a shared interest among other aspects of the natural world. The exhibition has
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- Aug 2, 2018
- 1 min
New Old Glory
Thanks to Henry Brimmer I recently was reintroduced to the 1987 book Stars & Stripes by Kit Hinrichs, his first book celebrating the flag he holds so dear (including this and this). This first wave includes the work of 96 designers and illustrators with a brief forward by yours truly. Below are some graphic and text materials related to and from the book. It reminds us that despite its many flaws, the grand old flag still represents a grand old system, that is worth saving, s
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- May 21, 2018
- 2 min
Glaser’s Abstraction Covered
Milton Glaser is an eclectic. Meaning he does not practice any single ideological method, manner or style. As a young student he noted, “My own training was not very doctrinaire.” He attended the High School of Music and Art in New York, where, he says, “I received one body of instruction, and then on to Cooper Union where I got another, then to the Art Students League for yet another.” These various methods taught him “that there was no single truth.” When I asked him in the
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- May 1, 2018
- 7 min
13 Graphic Designers Who Created Picture Books
Drawing is a skill that can be developed with practice. In the online course Intro to Drawing, you’ll learn techniques for drawing what you see using a correct technique. Studies in contour drawing, perspective, positive/negative space and value will help you build a foundation. The best picture books do what great graphic design does: share a story that stays. Built with the tools of layout, typography, color, contrast, shape, and line, picture books can guide attention, exp
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- Mar 6, 2018
- 2 min
The Unexpected Designs of Famous Designers
By: Steven Brower | March 6, 2018 The best of the best is what they are known for. Those groundbreaking designs indelibly linked with the designers themselves. But what happens when those designers step out of their comfort zone? Case in point, Alvin Lustig. Best known for his seminal book covers in the 1940s and 1950s for New Directions, he was also the creator of the opening credits for the classic cartoon “Mr. Magoo.” Having designed the UPA (United Productions of America)
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- Jan 2, 2018
- 7 min
Fletcher Hanks: The Most Twisted Comic Book Artist of All Time
Strangely, Fletcher Hanks has become one of the most famous of unknown comic book artists. From 1939 to 1941, he created characters that hardly anyone’s ever heard of. Stardust the Super Wizard. Fantomah the Mystery Woman of the Jungle. Big Red McLane, King of the North Woods. Hanks’ renderings of these stories have been described as clumsy, crude, incompetent hackwork and, most frequently, just plain ugly. Oh, and he was also allegedly a drunk who abused his wife and kids be
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- Dec 30, 2017
- 4 min
Mirko Ilić’s Mission to Promote Social Tolerance
Designer/illustrator Mirko Ilić is a man with a mission. Currently he has curated two touring poster shows on the subjects of political dissent and social tolerance, featuring work from the international design community. He has been traveling extensively in support of both. The first is “The Design of Dissent,” created with Milton Glaser. Originally displayed in 2005 at School of Visual Arts in NYC, it was accompanied by coffee table book published by Rockport Publishers. Ea
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- Apr 2, 2017
- 2 min
The Fine Art of Milton Glaser
Certainly no designer and perhaps no artist has been more involved in an open dialogue with artists of the past than Milton Glaser. From Piero della Francesca and Piero di Cosimo to Matisse, Seurat, Cézanne, Lautrec and Dumchamp, et al, Glaser has been inspired by and responded to their work for the last 60 plus years, beginning during his studies with Giorgio Morandi in Bologna in the early 1950s, on a Fullbright Scholarship. This fascination is in evidence in two concurrent
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- Mar 17, 2017
- 4 min
The Comic Art of Mirko Ilić
For over three decades, Yugoslavian born Mirko Ilić has been a mainstay of American graphic design. His groundbreaking design and illustration work has regularly graced such publications as The New York Times, Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, and myriad others, as well as numerous book covers and identities for luxury hotels and restaurants. He is the designer/author of several books, many done with co-author Steven Heller, and one he created with Mi
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- Dec 13, 2016
- 2 min
The Great Dylan Profile
Recently Steven Heller wrote of Glaser’s Ghosts, on how Milton’s Marcel Duchamp-inspired 1966 Bob Dylan poster has spawned myriad parodies, homages and rip offs. He earlier covered the history of the iconic image here. I also traced the origins of Glaser’s poster in a previous article. There is yet another legacy to the 50 year old poster that was included as added value in Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, and that is how the recent Nobel Prize winner’s profile is perhaps the most
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- Nov 23, 2016
- 2 min
Glaser’s Reclaimed Doodles
There is a lot to be learned from an artist’s random doodles. For example, the most telling thing about Milton Glaser’s sketches made when we served together on the AIGA board during the late 1980s is how beautifully he draws and how vividly and expressively he depicts the human form. I’d sit next to him at these meetings, making my own scribbles, occasionally peering over to my right in order to take a look at what he was up to. Extraordinary. I routinely noticed he’d either
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- Nov 3, 2016
- 6 min
Milton Glaser: “Art is a Judgment of History”
By Leida Snow The first question I put to the legendary Milton Glaser is whether what he creates is art. His swift answer: “Art is a judgment of history.” In Glaser’s design studio, the voices of children playing in the schoolyard next door tumble into the room. “You say ‘Art is whatever,’” I note. “Is anything art?” “Art is transformative,” he answers. “Once someone experiences art, there are changes in consciousness, of awareness, of what reality is. If it doesn’t change pe
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- Oct 5, 2016
- 2 min
Glaser’s Ghosts
When you Google “Dylan + Glaser” you will get pages of postage stamp-sized reproductions of his famous 1966 Bob Dylan poster that was folded into Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” LP released by CBS Records. It was inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s 1957 self portrait and the color palette found in Persian miniatures. Of the poster, Milton Glaser said: “The history of visual things in the world is my playpen.” Well, perhaps the Dylan poster is not as copied or mimicked as much as Glaser’s I
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- Aug 15, 2016
- 2 min
Man or Mouse! War is Hell!
In 1968, the war in Vietnam made Americans and the world aware that fighting on foreign soil could be government folly rather than a battle against falling dominoes. Regardless of whether one was for or against, in all wars there are many kinds of casualties, including soldiers, civilians and some of a nation’s most cherished icons. Mickey Mouse, presumably an apolitical symbol of American creativity, was recruited for an anti-war film created by Milton Glaser and Lee Savage
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- Jul 19, 2016
- 1 min
Milton Glaser’s Lesser-Known Covers, Uncovered
Literary critic Kingsley Amis’ New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960) is an analysis of the use of science fiction to address the issues emerging in modern society from the 18th–20th centuries, including topics as rampant as utopian and dystopian literature. The jacket, which seems inspired by the wit of Paul Klee and Joan Miro, defies what most people think of Milton Glaser’s work as seen in the late ’60s until the present. Yet over 50 years ago he was experime
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- Jun 29, 2016
- 1 min
The Devil’s Christmas in June
Pi is a disordered collection of printing type. If a printing form is accidentally dropped and breaks into bits, then it is “pied.” I’ve seen it happen once—a sight worse than accidentally breaking someone’s favorite vase. Then there are Pi Font-Characters not usually included in a font, but which are added for stylistic or expressive impact, like pointing fingers, accents, mathematical signs and other printing effluvia. In 1941 the legendary type house and design gallery The
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- Nov 18, 2015
- 1 min
The Ugly Face of War
On Nov. 19, Brooklyn Brewery founder and former Middle East correspondent Steve Hindy will sit down with author David Shields and graphic designer Milton Glaser to discuss Shields’ provocative new book, War is Beautiful, which challenges The New York Times‘ front-page representation of war imagery. Glaser designed the book cover. The event is part of the speaker series “War Correspondents at the Brooklyn Brewery,” which will benefit Sebastian Junger’s nonprofit organization R
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