Milton Glaser

At a young age, Glaser was already intent on becoming an artist. Early on, his desire was to be a cartoonist. In order to pursue this dream, he attended The New York High School of Act and Music. While there were courses on Graphic Design which he attended, Glaser's main focus during his time at the high school was on painting and cartooning. Eventually, Glaser states that he realized "there was another kind of world that went beyond my dream of being a cartoonist. I didn’t know exactly what it was yet, that there was such a thing called design." After high school, Glaser was promised a scholarship to Pratt which he intended to take. However, Glaser failed the entrance exam on two different occasions and did not receive his scholarship. Glaser moved on and began working as the art director for a packaging company. A few years later however, Glaser began attending Cooper Union and eventually became a Fullbright Scholar. This allowed him to pursue graduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy.

After education, Glaser created a design studio called Pushpin Studios which he founded along with several of his fellow graduates from Cooper Union. In order to gain a client base, they produced and distributed a publication called the Pushpin Almanac, later the Pushpin Graphic. Eventually, the publication had gained subscribers. While Pushpin remains strong today, Glaser eventually moved on and formed his own studio aptly named Milton Glaser Inc. Later on, Glaser began teaching at the School Of Visual Arts and then Cooper Union, both in New York City. To date, Glaser designs and is an integral part of the design community. Glaser states that he has no plans to retire and that "There is nothing I fear more than the idea of having to retire. I fear retirement more than death." Obviously, the end of Glaser's career is nowhere in sight.Glaser’s style is unique in that each of his pieces seems equally different. Glaser acknowledges his variety of styles in an interview in his book Graphic Design. In this interview, he states "At one point in my life, I realized that anything I did long enough to master was no longer useful to me. I've always felt that I could explore many phenomena, that, in fact, the whole visual world developed." Throughout his work, this variety of styles is evident. While many of his pieces, such as his Dylan and Aretha posters, feature bold, vivid colors combined with life like recreations of people, many of his other pieces have a cartoonist like quality, such as his I Love New York campaign design or his Simon and Garfunkel poster. If one were to skim through a book of his collected works, they may wonder who else contributed to this book, however, it would just be Milton Glaser. In addition to having a broad range of styles, Glaser uses his work as a means of expressing his own political and moral ideas. Whether one looks at his redesign of his "I Love New York" into "I Love New York More Than Ever" campaign after September 11th or his "W stands for Wrong" piece about George W. Bush, one can't help but understand the mind of Glaser. He consistently creates profound observations with simple designs.

links:
http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/glaser.html
http://www.areaofdesign.com/americanicons/glaser.htm
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200309/?read=interview_glaser

books:
Milton Glaser, Graphic Design
Milton Glaser & Mirko Ilic, The Design of Dissent