Milton Glaser, Master Designer

Milton Glaser, Master Designer of ‘I ♥ NY’ Logo, Is Dead at 91

He was also a founder of New York magazine, created a memorable Bob Dylan poster and produced designs for everything from supermarkets to restaurants to “Mad Men.”

Milton Glaser, a graphic designer who changed the vocabulary of American visual culture in the 1960s and ’70s with his brightly colored, extroverted posters, magazines, book covers and record sleeves, notably his 1967 poster of Bob Dylan with psychedelic hair and his “I ♥ NY” logo, died on Friday, his 91st birthday, in Manhattan.

His wife and only immediate survivor, Shirley Glaser, said the cause was a stroke. He also had renal failure.

Mr. Glaser brought wit, whimsy, narrative and skilled drawing to commercial art at a time when advertising was dominated by the severe strictures of modernism on one hand and the cozy realism of magazines like The Saturday Evening Post on the other.

At Push Pin Studios, which he and several former Cooper Union classmates formed in 1954, he opened up design to myriad influences and styles that began to grab the attention of magazines and advertising agencies, largely through the studio’s influential promotional publication, the Push Pin Almanack (later renamed Push Pin Monthly Graphic).

“We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence,” Mr. Glaser, who designed more than 400 posters over the course of his career, said in an interview for the book “The Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration” (2004).

“Art Nouveau, Chinese wash drawing, German woodcuts, American primitive paintings, the Viennese secession and cartoons of the ’30s were an endless source of inspiration,” he added. “All the things that the doctrine of orthodox modernism seemed to have contempt for — ornamentation, narrative illustration, visual ambiguity — attracted us.”

Mr. Glaser delighted in combining visual elements and stylistic motifs from far-flung sources. For a 1968 ad for Olivetti, he modified a 15th-century painting by Piero di Cosimo showing a mourning dog and inserted the Italian company’s latest portable typewriter at the feet of the dead nymph in the original artwork.

For the Dylan poster, a promotional piece included in the 1967 album “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits,” he created a simple outline of the singer’s head, based on a black-and-white self-portrait silhouette by Marcel Duchamp, and added thick, wavy bands of color for the hair, forms he imported from Islamic art.

Nearly six million posters made their way into homes across the world. Endlessly reproduced, the image became one of the visual signatures of the era.

“I ♥ NY,” his logo for a 1977 campaign to promote tourism in New York State, achieved even wider currency. Sketched on the back of an envelope with red crayon during a taxi ride, it was printed in black letters in a chubby typeface, with a cherry-red heart standing in for the word “love.” Almost immediately, the logo became an instantly recognized symbol of New York City, as recognizable as the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty.

“I’m flabbergasted by what happened to this little, simple nothing of an idea,” Mr. Glaser told The Village Voice in 2011.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, T-shirts emblazoned with the logo sold in the thousands, as visitors to the city seized on it as a way of expressing solidarity. Mr. Glaser designed a modified version — “I ♥ NY More Than Ever,” with a dark bruise on the heart — which was distributed as a poster throughout the city and reproduced on the front and back pages of The Daily News on Sept. 19.

Milton Glaser was born on June 26, 1929, in the Bronx, to Eugene and Eleanor (Bergman) Glaser, immigrants from Hungary. His father owned a dry-cleaning and tailoring shop; his mother was a homemaker.

When Milton was a young boy, an older cousin drew a bird on the side of a paper bag to amuse him. “Suddenly, I almost fainted with the realization that you could create life with a pencil,” he told Inc. magazine in 2014. “And at that moment, I decided that’s how I was going to spend my life.”

He took drawing classes with Raphael and Moses Soyer, the social realist artists, before enrolling in the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts). After twice failing the entrance exam for Pratt Institute, he worked at a package-design company before being accepted by the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

While at the Cooper Union, he and three classmates — Seymour Chwast, Edward Sorel and Reynold Ruffins — rented part of a loft in Greenwich Village and created a company, Design Plus. They completed one project: cork place mats with a silk-screened design, which they sold to Wanamaker’s department store.

He was hired by the British tycoon James Goldsmith in 1978 to redesign the interiors, exteriors and packaging of the Grand Union chain of supermarkets, which Mr. Goldsmith had just acquired. Mr. Glaser designed several projects for the restaurateur Joe Baum, most memorably the Big Kitchen food court on the ground-floor concourse of the World Trade Center, the 1990s redesign of Windows on the World there and the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center.

In 1983, with Walter Bernard, Mr. Glaser formed WBMG, a publication design firm that revamped dozens of newspapers and magazines in the United States and abroad, including The Washington Post and O Globo in Brazil. He and Mr. Bernard later collaborated on a history of their design work, “Mag Men: 50 Years of Making Magazines,” which was published in December.

He managed to stay current. In the late 1980s he designed the AIDS logo for the World Health Organization and the logo and packaging for Brooklyn Brewery, using a capital B inspired by the old Brooklyn Dodgers. He designed a logo for “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and posters for Vespa’s 50th anniversary in 1996 and for the final season of the television series “Mad Men” in 2014.

Mr. Glaser, whose other books include “The Milton Glaser Poster Book” (1977), “Art Is Work” (2000) and “Drawing Is Thinking” (2008), taught for many years at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. He was the subject of the 2008 documentary film “Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight.”

In 2004 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (now the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum), and in 2009 he became the first graphic designer to receive the National Medal of Arts.

“I’m a person who deals with visual material whatever it is — architecture, an object, a set of plates, wallpaper — right now I’m doing T-shirts,” he told Aileen Kwun and Bryn Smith for their book “Twenty Over Eighty: Conversations on a Lifetime in Architecture and Design” (2016). “I know a lot about the way things look, and as a consequence, I try to see how much of that world I can embrace.”