Milton Glaser made America cool again | Hacker News Reader

Milton Glaser made America cool again

newyorker.com

29 pointspseudolus19 comments

This framing is a bit hyperbolic. Saying Glaser was even the most influential art director of that era feels tenuous. But does anyone seriously think that a tourism ad campaign saved New York, or that a poster is what made Bob Dylan famous? Obviously good design is important. But also it's just a small part of a much wider world. When I see these kind of hero worship pieces I think of the coworkers that I have had to work with who have a massively inflated sense of proportion and genuinely buy this line of thinking. A bit of humility might be in order here.

My uncle is a kinetic sculptor and I have early childhood NYC memories of visiting him. The memories range from the smell of urine in the vestibule of his building on the Bowery or strategies to avoid ones battery from being stolen while parking a car. NYC had at least the reputation of being bankrupt. I also remember when suddenly the city exploded with the I heart NY campaign. The simple message was a master stroke of double-speak or Stockholm syndrome but proved as resilient and timeless as NYC.

I should add there were multimedia slide shows with songs in theaters on 42nd street. Surrounded by prostitution and pornography.

The drop in Crime and the increasing financialization of the American economy might also be contributing factors. It was a great ad campaign, but the calling it heroic exaggerates the importance.

No doubt that is true, but think you are neglecting the importance of simple messaging. The symbol endures to this day in exactly the same form and for the same purpose. To think this wasn’t heroic effort by many people is cynicism.

The work they did with the New York state has absolutely been monumental. So monumental even 40+ years later people still prefer it to the newest creations. This campaign also re-emerged after 9/11 as a symbol of support, something most campaigns can only dream of.

So it absolutely was a part of saving New York's tourism. Was it the sole reason, absolutely not, but I think in response to the article's "hyperbolic" views you're swinging far too much in the opposite direction by downplaying what impact it did have.

I feel like it might be more accurate to say the 60s and 70s were sort of a golden age of logo design and perhaps of graphic design more generally. Glaser was certainly one of the most famous practitioners of that era but elevating him over and above equally famous contemporaries like Paul Rand, Massimo Vignelli, and Saul Bass feels like a stretch for sure. And there was also a lot of great and enduring logo work during that period by less well-known designers (think Bruce Blackburn for NASA or Peter Oestrich for Kodak).

NYC in the late 70s had a major branding problem. It was widely thought of as a dying, crime-infested shithole (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/t-magazine/1970s-new-york...) Like per the 1975 headline "[President] Ford to City, Drop Dead".

Making it t-shirt worthy to say you loved NY was a major turnaround for the popular image of the city. No one thinks it singlehandedly saved NYC, but it's one of the most famous ad campaigns ever for good reason.

I was lucky to work with Milton for a few months some years before his passing.

He was very eloquent, and I warmly recommend his books Graphic Design and Art is Work, and his essay, Ten Things I Have Learned (PDF): https://www.miltonglaser.com/files/Essays-10things-8400.pdf

My favorite Milton Glaser video: https://vimeo.com/6986303

Do New Yorkers, people actually like the new "We [heart] NY" logo?? The original is iconic. If it ain't broke...

I don't. I like Glaser's. And also his IBM logo and a few others.

The IBM logo was Paul Rand.

Doh.

New Yorker articles are always way too long, and for this, about a designer, to have just one image of his work, I mean come on.

The letter-fetishists strike again, waging their dishonorable war on the visual arts (and our spare time).

You could always ask Chat GPT to summarize them for ya …

Was NYC ever actually not cool? It has financial ups and downs, but it has always been the place where real ambitious people go to do cool shit, right?

Yes, this era[1] was particularly rough for NYC.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_New_York_City_(1946...

A lot of "doing cool shit" 20th century development in the US happened outside of NY. Hollywood and aviation in LA. Tech in various places (Texas Instruments, for example, before Silicon Valley became THE place). Automobiles in Detroit. NY wasn't necessarily "uncool" the whole time, but there was definitely a time late in the century where it felt like it could've gone a similar way as Detroit, and became a completely hollowed shell.

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