Milton Glaser was one of the major graphic designers of the postwar era in America and he’s still very active today, at the age of 88. He co-founded New York magazine, created one of the most iconic images of Bob Dylan, and came up with a brand identity for New York City in the 1970s that was so effective it is still recognizable and in use today.
Abrams Books recently published a marvelous overview of Glaser’s career in the poster medium, with the informative title Milton Glaser Posters: 427 Examples from 1965 to 2017. The book, which is about the size of a paperback novel, has an intuitive format with the images on the right-hand side and Glaser’s terse but candid commentary on the left. (It’s also priced to move.)
Below are some representative images from the book along with Glaser’s remarks.
Big Nudes (1966)
“Except for the Dylan poster and the ‘I Love New York’ campaign, this School of Visual Arts poster announcing a show of paintings of large nudes seems to be my best-known work. The graphic idea was to show a nude so large it couldn’t fit on the page, extending into the space beyond the poster. Later, I did a large silkscreen of the same drawing that continues to sell like hotcakes.”
Dylan (1967)
“This poster, included with the 1967 Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits album, is probably the best-known work of mine, with the exception of the ‘I Love New York’ identity campaign. Why certain works become iconic is not easily understood, but here the celebrity of the subject is certainly part of the story.”
Milton Glaser Exhibition (1976)
“This stylized nude was done for a show of my work in Belgium. Although it is limited in color, it has a powerful graphic effect. For budgetary reasons, there were only two colors available for the poster. By printing the green over the red, we created the black form––a powerful image, largely due to the limitation of color.”
More after the jump…