Hey, Mr. Design Man

In contemporary culture, graphic design is the generic term for the multidisciplinary practice of combining typography, images and, increasingly, some combination of media for the purpose of informing, instructing or persuading a given audience to do something. Graphic designers both conceive of such methods of persuasion and, to varying degrees, execute them. As emissaries of communication, they visualize solutions for the presentation of abstract data, turning ideas into things: They create books and magazines, posters and packaging, exhibitions and Web sites, logos and film titles. Graphic design is a visual language uniting harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and content. But it is also an idiomatic language, a language of cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye. Good design is a function of both an original idea and the ability to express it. How it is expressed is what makes it art. What you remember about it is what makes it design. In the end, a designer’s ability to both imagine and orchestrate an effective visual solution benefits from many things, not least of which is an acutely heightened capacity for sustained and thoughtful observation. Advances in computing technology over the last decade have, to some degree, simplified the manufacture of design--gone are the days of paste-up and mechanicals, for instance--but make no mistake, graphic design is all about ideas. And making ideas visually manifest takes work: work to conceive them, work to articulate them, work to make the corresponding elements appear so effortlessly synthesized that the resultant form becomes irrevocably etched upon your mind.

The idea that work, at least in a semantic sense, might replace what we call art is what Milton Glaser sets out to consider in his latest book, “Art Is Work”. In his clear, if confessional, introduction, he offers a redefinition of “art” that repositions it, somewhat interchangeably, with “design,” along the utilitarian axis of everyday life, thereby reinforcing its relative consequence and, by conjecture, its enduring value. Glaser subsequently examines some of the more essential moral obstacles facing the graphic designer, such as the question of intention, the role of dignity and the definition of “design” itself (“anything purposeful can be an act of design”). What follows over the next 200-plus pages are more than 500 images drawn from Glaser’s eclectic portfolio that illuminate his process and help explain the resulting “work,” which, from the standpoint of both quantity and quality, is considerable. How much of it is art--and arguably, how much of art is design--remains another question entirely, and it is a question that in this book, at least, remains largely unresolved.

It is difficult--perhaps impossible--to use the word “oeuvre” in describing the body of work of a graphic designer and not sound ridiculous or pretentious or both. But it is a word that is frequently used--quite fittingly, as it turns out--to describe the prolific Glaser and the hefty half-century’s worth of material represented here. Twenty-five years after the publication of “Milton Glaser: Graphic Design” (the longest-selling design book in history), Glaser’s remains a robust career, with an impressive portfolio and an equally notable list of accomplishments. At 71, he is without question one of the preeminent designers of his generation. Glaser’s innumerable contributions to our modern graphic landscape include such 20th century icons as his Bob Dylan poster of 1966 and his “I (Heart) NY” logo of 1975. Yet in spite of his commercial success (or perhaps because of it) he has found time to build and sustain a remarkable career as an artist, teacher, writer and partner in such distinguished studios as The Pushpin Group (founded in 1954 in collaboration with Reynold Ruffins, Seymour Chwast and Edward Sorel) and WBMG (founded in 1983 with editorial designer Walter Bernard), in addition to founding his own studio, Milton Glaser Inc. in 1974, the same year he co-founded New York magazine with Clay Felker.

Glaser’s ability to both maintain a commercial practice and pursue his own personal studio work says as much about his business acumen as his creative strengths--to say nothing of his stamina. All three testify to the breadth of his abilities which, particularly in the realm of craftsmanship, far exceed those of the average designer. As befits his prodigious output, Glaser is the recipient of numerous awards from such internationally acclaimed organizations as the American Institute of Graphic Arts and The Royal Academy of Designers in Great Britain and is the only living graphic designer to have been honored with one-person shows at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Glaser’s work is deeply intellectual, frequently allegorical and, in some cases, extremely personal. His formal repertoire draws from diverse sources, including Italian Renaissance painting, Chinese brush drawing, 19th-century Russian fiction and 20th-century surrealist poetry. He freely quotes Apollinaire, references Baudelaire and cites T.S. Eliot. And in defense of both his humility and his capability, he is as comfortable redesigning a can of peas as he is redesigning Paris Match. In between, there are posters and prototypes, magazines and monotypes, annual reports, book jackets, record labels and exhibitions. There are products: dishes and umbrellas, carpets and toys and jewelry. There are logos: for Childrens’ Television Workshop, “Angels in America” and the World Health Organization (Glaser designed the international AIDS symbol). There are restaurants: The Rainbow Room, La Trattoria and Windows on The World in New York. There are corporate redesigns: a comprehensive face lift for the Grand Union Supermarket chain in the 1970s which included signage and packaging and even architectural modifications. (“We changed the aisle system to make the customer’s path more discretionary,” notes a poetic Glaser.) There are newspaper and magazine redesigns, both in the United States and abroad, that include the Washington Post, L’Express and Lire, Magazine Week and Wine Spectator. And there are collaborations: for a paper company several years ago, Glaser sent 100 questionnaires to an international roster of designers, then meticulously cataloged their responses. The result is an art direction tour de force that celebrates the sometimes ironic, often iconic range of interpretations framing the simple notion of “beauty.” Interestingly, and in spite of the clearly unpredictable nature of its collaborative content, the final form reads very much like a Glaser production.

And then there are portraits: Here Glaser’s observational proficiency is perhaps unrivaled. His subject matter ranges from the classic (the Duke of Montefeltro, for instance) to the contemporary (Bob Dylan, for instance), each executed with the gestural inflections suited to the era, the subject and the appropriate context in which the portrait would need to perform, in a sense. Though the technical skill required to replicate likeness may be considered an art form, this instinct--injecting a sense of appropriateness into the complex cocktail of visual choices--is a pure and practical design tactic. In Glaser’s capable hands, the image of Montefeltro, exquisitely adapted from the famous painting by Piero della Francesca, reflects the classic authority of a traditional portrait. Equally suited to its own pop-culture gestalt, the Dylan profile--abstracted locks of cartoonish hair framed by an equally, and appropriately, exaggerated typeface--has become an enduring icon of 1960s nostalgia. Glaser is ambivalent about images like this one--and the now ubiquitous “I (Heart) NY” logo--that have become, in a sense, his iconic calling card. And looking at the balance of work in this book, it would be hard to disagree with him.

Glaser was educated at the Cooper Union in New York and later studied with Giorgio Morandi in Bologna on a Fulbright grant. The Italians use the term “disegno” to define both drawing and design, and it is likely that it was during his sejour in Italy that Glaser embarked on what has since become an ambitious, lifelong commitment to pursue both drawing and designing, each with the ongoing cooperation of the other. (His facility with regard to drawing is remarkable and is without question one of the most engaging aspects of the book.) It is worth noting, too, that though the earlier volume indexed each project and cited its technique--a mannerism that in today’s software-enabled climate seems oddly, if charmingly, arcane--one of the notable features of the new book lies in Glaser’s candid documentation accompanying each project. Throughout these pages, the designer’s first-person captions both analyze and reconsider his conceptual and stylistic choices. The writing here is refreshingly honest: Glaser is thoughtful and reflective, warm and open, occasionally self-deprecating, sometimes even self-critical as he tirelessly revisits his own infinitely rigorous process.

Such analysis is both rare and reassuring in design literature. To begin with, it is unusual for a design monograph to be autobiographical. There are, of course, exceptions: The late designer Paul Rand published numerous books of design criticism using examples drawn from his own work to both illustrate and punctuate his famously forceful opinions. Like Glaser and the American designer Ivan Chermayeff, whose monograph will be published later this year, Rand also habitually signed his design work: On this topic, the larger-than-life Rand once remarked, “The reason I always insisted on signing my work was not to be subordinate to anyone.” It is possible, though doubtful, that Glaser shares Rand’s reasoning: Nevertheless, it smacks of art-making and remains an unusual practice for a graphic designer.

Second, Glaser’s book is more detailed in its exposition of the designer’s actual working process, demonstrating the critical, ideological and formal steps that precede visualization. The voluminous quantity of sketch material here--Glaser’s ideological marginalia, as it were--not only supports this notion but reinforces its relative impact by qualifying, in a sense, the presentation of the final resolved form. Though equally impassioned in its portrayal and, in some cases, its defense of the work, Glaser’s writing avoids Rand’s stentorian, world-according-to-me tone. The writing here is less authoritative: It’s more personal, more gracious and much more generous, ultimately, both in its view of design and in its presentation of the broader cultural context within which it and its creator so comfortably reside. (Glaser’s benevolence when citing his clients is astonishing and suggests a degree of interpersonal diplomacy that would do well to influence the entire design profession.)

On a critical note, Glaser’s work is occasionally more successful in concept than in execution. (This is one of the advantages of a book that so generously exposes its subtext.) Some of the projects feel dated, redolent of the kind of visual vernacular--the bold supergraphics, the bright color palettes--that seem permanently lodged in the mid-’70s. Other projects feel graphically repetitious, obligatory or simply ornamental. A series of enamel jewelry designs that loosely draw from the art deco vocabulary of The Rainbow Room are little more than decorative: Here, what is missing is that magical transformative moment in which the designer not only transposes the art reference but reframes or elevates it to embrace a new set of formal relationships. This absence is especially apparent in some of the projects requiring a transition from two to three dimensions, from sketch to materiality. For the New York restaurant Aurora, one of Glaser’s early lighting studies is delightfully dynamic, a series of elliptical constellations of subtly gradated color: six elegant pastel discs gracefully aloft, orbiting around an invisible vertical light source. Edited back to a single ceiling-mounted pearlescent bowl in its final incarnation, the fixture takes on a weighty opacity that makes it appear at once static and disappointingly obvious.

But there are numerous (and some quite marvelous) exceptions. For a series of monotypes depicting Dante’s “Purgatory,” Glaser shares the struggle not only in resolving the mediation among text, image and metaphor but also in visually articulating the seemingly intangible tensions between hope and despair, hell and purgatory, sin and redemption. In a similarly rich exploration, a series of portraits of Johann Sebastian Bach sets out to explore the qualitative variances of mood, material and surface. In the accompanying text, the designer recalls his decision to clothe the composer in what he calls his “fugueing” suit. Here, Glaser has literally interpreted the form of the Bach fugue in a set of flat patterns that replay--through scale, juxtaposition and schematic inference--the fugue’s essential musical structure and compositional imperatives. This is vintage Glaser: illustrative and witty, engaging and inventive--and brilliant. Regrettably, it is reproduced here almost parenthetically, in miniature. I would have put it on the cover.

In an interview some years ago, Glaser was asked to reflect on some of the sources and influences that led to the formation of The Pushpin Group. He cited the broad eclectic interests of the Pushpin partners--their love of romantic typography and American primitives, for instance--that led to the often playful investigations of juxtaposed vernacular forms and spoke passionately about their mutual interest in storytelling. He described Pushpin’s creative revolt against what was, at the time, the minimalist ideals of mid-century modernism. But drawing was key: “We all felt we had to draw,” he explained, “to control the idiom.” Glaser’s new book is a celebration of idiom, in all its glorious media and manifestations. And ultimately it is this, more than the work-versus-art debate, that characterizes both Glaser’s magnificent oeuvre and this impressive volume, demonstrating in the end that whether it is called art, design or just plain work, the combined strengths of technical mastery, creative enthusiasm and the restless power of an inquisitive mind can produce meaningful and, indeed, lasting impressions.