OT: RIP Milton Glaser, legendary graphic designer

[fiamme red]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/milton-glaser-new-york-and-iny-designer-dies-at-91.html?

If they’re talented and they’re lucky, designer-artist-creators get to lob an icon out into the larger culture — Leo Fender’s Stratocaster guitar, say, or Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster. If they’re great, maybe they create two. Milton Glaser, though, operated on another plane — he just kept hitting the bull’s-eye, again and again, throughout his seven decades as an illustrator, graphic designer, art director, and visual philosopher and paterfamilias. He loved New York City, and celebrated it in multiple ways: with a magazine, with posters, and (most visibly of all) with the three-letters-and-a-red-heart slogan he created. Almost incidentally, he also changed the way you eat...https://www.cbsnews.com/news/milton-glaser-died-designer-of-i-love-ny-logo-dead-age-91-cause-of-death-stroke-2020-06-27/

"I just like to do everything, and I was always interested in seeing how far I could go in stretching the boundaries," he said.He was also one of the founders of New York Magazine.

https://cbsnews2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2020/06/27/3f96b567-ade0-4b08-a810-4077f2b2e51b/thumbnail/620x939/82afb29c59d14c0444f5c3ba3bb372ab/bob-dylan-poster-for-columbia-records-milton-glaser-620.jpg

https://www.miltonglaser.com/thumbs/665x408/files/far/iHeartNy-8744.jpg

[picstloup]

He was a big influence on me and graphic design and illustration in general since the 1950s. I was introduced to his work in the 70s. Bought one his serigraphs, an Italian landscape, in the 1990s in a show of his work in New York. Art is Work. He wasn't kidding.

[verbs4us]

Here is a remembrance I posted on FB:

For nearly ten years I had the blessing of working with Milton as a client, on the design of the Schlumberger annual report. It was a brief, shining period when graphic sophistication and nuance in corporate communication was valued. The purpose of design, he believed, was to illuminate and advance the story and get out of the way. Any design that called attention to itself was considered third-rate. We avoided clever and current. Every photograph had a caption, every person had a name. Everything shown had to matter to the story; there was no nice-to-have.

His studio felt like a refuge from the world's nonsense because, under Milton's eye, sense could be made of the senseless. Every problem was solved in a way that had an inevitable simplicity, usually lurking all around us that only Milton saw. His other gift -- rare in the first place and rarer still among visual artists -- was an unusually articulate and direct way of talking about the work at hand. All ideas around the table were welcomed, as he talked, listened and doodled at the same time. Toward the end of the engagement, some people in my company saw him as dated, out of touch. In some ways, the very idea of art with lasting power had become outmoded and the idea of art as a necessary vector of a specific corporate point of view became devalued. In a bittersweet way, I am happy to think, with our country torn apart in so many ways, his way of finding and expressing meaning will re-emerge: listening, probing, respecting and laughing. And doing the hardest, most painful work of all: thinking.

[paredown]

Here is a remembrance I posted on FB:

For nearly ten years I had the blessing of working with Milton as a client, on the design of the Schlumberger annual report. It was a brief, shining period when graphic sophistication and nuance in corporate communication was valued. The purpose of design, he believed, was to illuminate and advance the story and get out of the way. Any design that called attention to itself was considered third-rate. We avoided clever and current. Every photograph had a caption, every person had a name. Everything shown had to matter to the story; there was no nice-to-have.

His studio felt like a refuge from the world's nonsense because, under Milton's eye, sense could be made of the senseless. Every problem was solved in a way that had an inevitable simplicity, usually lurking all around us that only Milton saw. His other gift -- rare in the first place and rarer still among visual artists -- was an unusually articulate and direct way of talking about the work at hand. All ideas around the table were welcomed, as he talked, listened and doodled at the same time. Toward the end of the engagement, some people in my company saw him as dated, out of touch. In some ways, the very idea of art with lasting power had become outmoded and the idea of art as a necessary vector of a specific corporate point of view became devalued. In a bittersweet way, I am happy to think, with our country torn apart in so many ways, his way of finding and expressing meaning will re-emerge: listening, probing, respecting and laughing. And doing the hardest, most painful work of all: thinking.

Lovely--thanks for sharing!

[djdj]

+1

[572cv]

Here is a remembrance I posted on FB:

For nearly ten years I had the blessing of working with Milton as a client, on the design of the Schlumberger annual report. It was a brief, shining period when graphic sophistication and nuance in corporate communication was valued. The purpose of design, he believed, was to illuminate and advance the story and get out of the way. Any design that called attention to itself was considered third-rate. We avoided clever and current. Every photograph had a caption, every person had a name. Everything shown had to matter to the story; there was no nice-to-have.

His studio felt like a refuge from the world's nonsense because, under Milton's eye, sense could be made of the senseless. Every problem was solved in a way that had an inevitable simplicity, usually lurking all around us that only Milton saw. His other gift -- rare in the first place and rarer still among visual artists -- was an unusually articulate and direct way of talking about the work at hand. All ideas around the table were welcomed, as he talked, listened and doodled at the same time. Toward the end of the engagement, some people in my company saw him as dated, out of touch. In some ways, the very idea of art with lasting power had become outmoded and the idea of art as a necessary vector of a specific corporate point of view became devalued. In a bittersweet way, I am happy to think, with our country torn apart in so many ways, his way of finding and expressing meaning will re-emerge: listening, probing, respecting and laughing. And doing the hardest, most painful work of all: thinking.

Thanks for this remembrance. Using design to better communicate with people: what a concept! There have been a few people in the last century or so who have rocked the world with elegant stripped down images. He was one!

[fiamme red]

Here is a remembrance I posted on FB:

For nearly ten years I had the blessing of working with Milton as a client, on the design of the Schlumberger annual report. It was a brief, shining period when graphic sophistication and nuance in corporate communication was valued. The purpose of design, he believed, was to illuminate and advance the story and get out of the way. Any design that called attention to itself was considered third-rate. We avoided clever and current. Every photograph had a caption, every person had a name. Everything shown had to matter to the story; there was no nice-to-have.

His studio felt like a refuge from the world's nonsense because, under Milton's eye, sense could be made of the senseless. Every problem was solved in a way that had an inevitable simplicity, usually lurking all around us that only Milton saw. His other gift -- rare in the first place and rarer still among visual artists -- was an unusually articulate and direct way of talking about the work at hand. All ideas around the table were welcomed, as he talked, listened and doodled at the same time. Toward the end of the engagement, some people in my company saw him as dated, out of touch. In some ways, the very idea of art with lasting power had become outmoded and the idea of art as a necessary vector of a specific corporate point of view became devalued. In a bittersweet way, I am happy to think, with our country torn apart in so many ways, his way of finding and expressing meaning will re-emerge: listening, probing, respecting and laughing. And doing the hardest, most painful work of all: thinking.Thank you for sharing this eloquent and touching tribute.

I've been browsing Glaser's website. Lots of interesting stuff there.

https://www.miltonglaser.com/milton/c:interviews/#4

MP: If you could change one fundamental thing about the way design is taught, what would it be?

MG: I would change the perception of the purpose of design that is deeply embedded in design education. Because it's linked to art, design is often taught as a means as expressing yourself. So you see with students, particularly young people, they come out with no idea that there is an audience. The first thing I try to teach them in class is you start with the audience. If you don't know who you're talking to, you can't talk to anybody.

MP: So how is an audience different from a client?

MG: There are usually three participants: a client, a designer, and an audience. Each of them has different needs. What you hope to achieve is an integration of all those needs. The client needs to sell more of his biscuits; the designer wants to do something fresh and original that also sells his biscuits; and the audience wants to feel that what you tell them about the biscuits is significant and will move them to action. So they're three legs of the stool. What you try to do is get a little bit for everybody. To some degree the reconciliation of ethics, beauty and purpose is just one thing. The game is how you reconcile what some may see as contradictory impulses and make that all come together in a singular response to the problem...

[Bob Ross]

https://cbsnews2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2020/06/27/3f96b567-ade0-4b08-a810-4077f2b2e51b/thumbnail/620x939/82afb29c59d14c0444f5c3ba3bb372ab/bob-dylan-poster-for-columbia-records-milton-glaser-620.jpg

When I was a wee pre-teen (so, circa 1971 or 73 maybe?) I spent a long weekend at my uncle's rustic cabin in the Catskill mountains...three rooms, tiny, the entire structure heated by one cast iron wood-burning stove in the kitchen, the whole thing perched precariously on the side of a mountain that was accessible only via 4-wheel-drive vehicle up a ~half-mile dirt driveway.

Besides what I just wrote, plus some vague memories of the pond and field I found another half mile or so up the mountain from his cabin, the only other thing I remember from that weekend was that he had ^^^that Dylan poster on the wall of the living room.