"Milton Glaser: POP" in The New Yorker

A quote from the article, "How the Graphic Designer Milton Glaser Made America Cool Again" by Adam Gopnik in today’s The New Yorker.

 

'No art director’s work was more influential or instantly identifiable than that of Milton Glaser. The extent of that style, which adorned books and records and movies—and is revealed in a new anthology from Monacelli, courtesy of Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber, titled simply “Milton Glaser: Pop”—is astounding. Glaser was famous as the co-founder and original design director of New York and as a creator of two images that helped define two decades. One was the 1966 poster of Bob Dylan that showed him with snakelike hair blossoming into a skein of rainbows. The other was the 1976 “INY” logo—which was commissioned by the State of New York but promptly adopted as a local symbol of the city, and, being keyed to the city’s unexpected revival, is the closest thing there has ever been to a logo that changed social history.'

 

'Of all the riches embedded in the Monacelli book, it may be the complete covers of the Signet Shakespeare, from around the same period as the Dylan poster, that are the most arresting. A central figure, usually enigmatically representative of the play’s action, appears in half-finished form, done in a charmingly elegant, linear style that recalls both Aubrey Beardsley and white-figure Greek vases; only a small patch of the drawing is in color, while the rest spins out like suggestive smoke. “Hamlet” is an agonized youth’s face, with a watching father’s head springing from his own and a barely suggested woman’s head—Ophelia?—alongside; “Julius Caesar,” memorably, is a tilting classical figure in profile, a zigzag of blue on a white implied toga to suggest greatness and a spot of pure red nearby to imply his stabbing. If you had no idea of what a play was about, none of these covers would tell you. Glaser relies on a general knowledge of the text—Hamlet is haunted, Julius Caesar is killed—and then suggests with his cryptic images that this story is more interesting and somehow more contemporary than one might have thought. The covers were less illustrations of the plays than they were invitations to read them.'