Milton Glaser, a prolific Manhattan graphic designer credited with creating the iconic I Love NY tourism logo has died.
Glaser passed away Friday after suffering a stroke, his wife Shirley told the New York Times. Her husband also had renal failure.
He was the son of Eugene and Eleanor (Bergman) Glaser, who were Hungarian immigrants. His father owned a dry-cleaning business and tailoring shop. His mother had been a homemaker.
The Bronx native had come up with the I Love NY logo after drawing it on the back of an envelope in red crayon while on a taxi cab ride.
Milton Glaser, a prolific Manhattan graphic designer credited with creating the iconic I Love NY tourism logo, has died. Glaser passed away Friday after suffering a stroke, his wife Shirley told the New York Times. Her husband also had renal failure
The I Love NY logo is pictured in front of the New York State capitol. Glaser came up with the idea for the logo after drawing it on the back of an envelope while riding in a taxi cab
The logo was designed with black letters and relied on a red colored heart shape, instead of spelling out the word love, and was a precursor to the use of today’s emoji symbols.
The tourism campaign which has relied on the logo started in 1977 and remains in use today.
The logo itself became as well-recognized around the world as some of New York’s landmarks, including the Empire State Building.
‘I’m flabbergasted by what happened to this little, simple nothing of an idea,’ Mr. Glaser told The Village Voice in 2011, the Times reports.
The logo after the September 11th terrorist attacks was updated to read I Love NY More than Ever and was shown with a small bruise on the heart.
It was a popular response to the tragedy, which even made it on to a wrap around page used for front and back pages of the Daily News a week after the attack.
The logo after the September 11th terrorist attacks was updated to read I Love NY More than Ever and was shown with a small bruise on the heart. It was a popular response to the tragedy, which even made it to the front page of the Daily News at the time.
Glaser learned to draw from social realist artists Raphael and Moses Soyer and attended High School of Music & Art in Manhattan, renamed Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. He also flunked the entrance exam.
After twice failing the entrance exam to get into Pratt Institute, he enrolled at Cooper Union. He then started Push Pin Studios with some of his classmates in 1954. He also was cofounder of New York Magazine in 1968.
He became known for a number of lighter design styles that resonated with magazine publishers and advertisers who turned to his work over traditional commercial art.
Other designers at the time swung between modernist-influenced images to more defined realism, as reflected, for example, in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, the Times reports.
Glaser, who had still kept his offices in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood open for business until April of last year, had started Push Pin Studios with some of his classmates from Cooper Union in 1954
‘We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence,’ said Glaser during an interview for the 2004 book, ‘The Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration’.
‘Art Nouveau, Chinese wash drawing, German woodcuts, American primitive paintings, the Viennese secession and cartoons of the ’30s were an endless source of inspiration,’ he added.
‘All the things that the doctrine of orthodox modernism seemed to have contempt for– ornamentation, narrative illustration, visual ambiguity – attracted us.’
Amid his work in the 1960s and 1970s, he also designed a famed poster of Bob Dylan with psychedelic hair.
As many as 6 million prints were made of the poster, which came as part of Dylan’s 1967 great hits album.
Over his career, Glaser would design more than 400 posters.
Amid his work in the 1960s and 1970s, he also designed a famed poster of Bob Dylan with psychedelic hair