54 | JANUARY 6 • 2022

Looking Back

From the William Davidson Digital Archive of Jewish Detroit History

accessible at www.djnfoundation.org

A Design Icon
N

ew York City’s School of Visual Arts
is currently displaying an exhibition
in tribute to Milton Glaser (1929-
2020). Glaser was an internationally acclaimed
Jewish graphic designer and illustrator and,
with partner Seymour Chwast, a co-founder
of the Push Pin Design Studios in 1954. He
worked there until he passed at
age 91.
Glaser’s career is impressive.
The son of Hungarian Jewish
immigrants, he graduated from
Manhattan’s High School of
Art and Design, and Cooper
Union College in New York
City. Glaser also studied at the
Accademia di
Belle Arti in Bologna, Italy.
From this point forward,
one needs a lengthy scorecard
to capture all his work. Glaser
designed newspapers, maga-
zines, logos, corporate identity
and architectural projects, and
co-founded New York Magazine
in 1968. He believed that “
All
the work I do is basically work
of persuasion.
”
A small sampling indicates the breadth of
Glaser’s work. He did designs for PBS’s Mobile
Masterpiece Theater, brochures for Steelcase
Corporation in Grand Rapids, and packaging
for Mattel’s Barbie Dolls and new Hershey
candies. He designed more than 400 posters,
including the famous psychedelic poster that
was included with Bob Dylan’s first “great-
est hits” album. And along the way, Glaser
designed 10 different type fonts.
Glaser’s most famous design is one that
most, if not all of us, will recognize — the
“I ❤ NY” — famous on coffee mugs, T-shirts
and other souvenirs from the Big Apple. It
is one of the most imitated designs in histo-
ry, although Glaser himself did not like the
acclaim for this icon.
I was told that Glaser had a direct con-
nection to the JN, so I decided to go into the
William Davidson Digital Archive of Jewish

Detroit History for the story. Along the way, I
found two additional connections.
Glaser’s Push Pin group did a complete
redesign of the JN in 1997. The JN had doubled
in size from 72 pages per week in 1986
to 156 pages by 1996. Then-publisher
Arthur Horwitz described the JN as “a
house that kept adding new rooms and
wings but no longer had a coherent floor
plan” (July 18, 2017). So, he hired Push
Pin Group, founded by “international
icons of design,
” to do a complete and rad-
ical redesign of the JN, from typefaces to a
new logo, from rules for use of white space
to content flow. The redesign debuted in
September 1997 and was the foundation of
the JN layout for many years
(it should be noted that, never
standing still, the JN has had
various redesigns since then).
In the Archive, I found that
Glaser had two other direct
connections to Detroit. First,
there is an interesting sidebar
with a Don Cohen article
about Bob Dylan in the Sept.
22, 2005, JN. Speaking of
his favorite Dylan music, Adat Shalom
Rabbi Aaron Bergman revealed that
Milton Glaser was his cousin. “Friendly
Persuasion” in the Jan. 31, 2003, JN is
about “two renowned Jewish artists” dis-
playing their works at Center Galleries in
Detroit: Murray Tinkleman and Milton
Glaser.
Milton Glaser became the first
graphic designer to receive the pres-
tigious National Medal of
the Arts, presented to him
by President Barak Obama
in 2009. A well-deserved
honor, indeed, for a great
designer.

Want to learn more? Go to
the DJN Foundation archives,
available for free at
www.djnfoundation.org.

Mike Smith
Alene and
Graham Landau
Archivist Chair