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Milton Glaser
‘I am nervous about ideologies, whether it’s the ideology of business or the ideology of Bolshevism. I get nervous in the presence of absolute certainty’
Milton Glaser was born in New York City in 1929. He studied at the Cooper Union Art School in New York and won a Fulbright scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. In 1955 he co-founded Push Pin Studios with Seymour Chwast and Edward Sorel. As an illustrator and design Glaser helped alter the course of American graphic design. In an era dominated by Swiss rationalism, the Push Pin style celebrated the eclectic and eccentric design of the passé past while it introduced a distinctly contemporary design vocabulary, with a wide range of work that included record sleeves, books, posters, corporate logotypes, font design and magazine formats. His pictorial eclecticism left a mark on a generation – so much so that his leaving Push Pin in 1974 was as significant an event in the design world as the Beatles break-up was in popular music. But Glaser had broader horizons. He was a founder of New York Magazine (as well as its ‘Underground gourmet’ – writing about good, cheap restaurants in New York), and publication design had become a big interest. Setting off on his own he founded Milton Glaser Inc., which devoted itself to multi-disciplinary design, including restaurant and supermarket design. A recent client is the Starbucks coffee-house chain. With Walter Bernard (former art director of Time) Glaser co-founded WBMG, a studio dedicated to magazine and newspaper design work. At the same time he turned his attention to painting and print-making. In addition, he has taught a design class at the School of Visual Arts in New York that has been one of America’s most respected programmes for over 30 years. Glaser’s magazine credits include Paris Match, L’Express and Village Voice.
Steven Heller: How has the design field changed since you entered it over 40 years ago?
Milton Glaser: The most important change is the acceptance of the fact that design is an absolutely essential part of the process of business, and consequently, that it is too important to leave in the hands of designers.
SH: Do you mean that designers have reverted back to service personnel?
MG: How to communicate is determined within organisations significantly more than it was when I entered the field. The design process has now been integrated into a client’s control system, so that instead of going outside for people who had more understanding about how to communicate effectively, they now make their determinations from a marketing point of view and then, more often that not, go outside to implement those ideas … Clients now have a much greater preconception of what they want. The briefings are very different. The determinations of what is appropriate are very often those of a marketing department as opposed to the somewhat casual and random solutions that occurred when people didn’t know better.
SH: So are you saying that before design became as sophisticated as it is today, the designer has more licence to play and experiment?
MG: In a way. An intense professionalisation has occurred, and a hardening of the authority between the client and designer. In the old days, clients would go to somebody like Paul Rand with the hope he would invent the form that would communicate what they were not imaginative enough to communicate. Today, they go to a designer and say, ‘These are our objective, this is the vernacular we hope to use, these are the key elements to be expressed‘, and so on.
SH: Do you think this new-found literacy is a result of there being too much professional design?
MG: Well, part of it comes from the professionalisation of the practice and the fact that there are more people who are more experienced at doing this than ever before. A consequence of this professionalisation is that accidents don’t happen as much and there is more conformity based on the previous success. Accident are often the opportunity that people have for expressing ideas and personal vision.
SH: Doesn’t this contribute to an underground that subverts convention or, at the very least, finds alternative ways of expression through design?
MG: Sure. But it is very important when you talk about design to realise that it is so highly segmented today in terms of objectives and activities that there is no general definition that applies to the whole field. Those who are outside the commercial system – who don’t have a practice that helps people sell goods, and use design as a kind of theoretical enterprise – are on a different track. Design can certainly be subversive when its subtext is to undermine the assumptions of a political or social system, not to mention an artistic one. Frankly, I am nervous about all ideologies, whether it’s the ideology of business or the ideology of Bolshevisim. I get nervous in the presence of absolute certainty . . .
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