Milton Glaser, the legendary graphic designer behind the “I ♥ New York” logo, longtime School of Visual Arts faculty member and acting chairman of the SVA Board—whose eclecticism and humanism continually shaped American design over his prolific 65-year career—died on Friday, June 26, 2020, his 91st birthday. He is survived by his wife, Shirley, who served as the director of SVA’s Visual Arts Gallery in the 1960s.

“Our beloved friend and compass Milton Glaser will be missed every day at SVA, around this city and around the world,” SVA President David Rhodes said in a statement to the College community.

A role model to many, Glaser was known as much for his visionary designs and art direction as his love of the creative process itself. At a talk earlier this year, celebrating the recent publication of his book Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines, co-written with Walter Bernard (1961 Graphic Design) and Anne Quito (MFA 2014 Design Criticism), Glaser reiterated his allegiance to the words of Roman critic Horace: that an artist’s aim is “to inform and delight”—a credo that also serves as the title to a 2009 documentary about Glaser.

“The idea that you can both learn and be exhilarated by something is so wonderful,” he said. “What else could you hope for?”

Glaser set the tone for his influential career early, in 1954, when he co-founded the trailblazing Push Pin Studios with Cooper Union classmates Seymour Chwast, Edward Sorel, and Reynold Ruffins. Push Pin soon became known for its embrace of “the things Modernism taught us to hate,” as Glaser put it—ornament, illustration, storytelling, playful reappropriations of historical styles—as well as its rejection of the sentimental realism of contemporary commercial illustration. Push Pin and Glaser’s work throughout the 1960s arguably helped establish the look of the decade’s counterculture and its psychedelic aesthetics, exemplified by Glaser’s poster for Bob Dylan’s 1966 Greatest Hits album: a black silhouette of the musician’s face in profile, electrified by a head of kaleidoscopic curls and a custom, chunky typeface. (In 2014 Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner commissioned Glaser to create the on-air and print graphics for the series’ final season.) He left Push Pin in 1974, when he felt the studio had developed too much a fixed style, and formed Milton Glaser, Inc.

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