Milton Glaser and his love of New York

Today we bring the one who is undoubtedly one of the great designers of all time, one of those who invented the concept of Visual Art within what we now call Graphic Arts and the person who has done the most for the fame of his hometown. It's a pleasure to talk about Milton Glaser and his love to New YorkMilton Glaser's work is on permanent display at the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art in New York), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem) and the Smithsonian Institute (Washington, DC). Glaser's work is very much based on simplicity, being direct, simple and original, with his work having a great visual and conceptual richness. We can say that the Great Milton was one of the greatest representatives of the term "Commercial Art".

Born in New York In 1929, he studied at the High School of Music and Art and the Cooper Union Art School, training he completed at the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna with the painter Giorgio Morandi, thanks to a Fulbright grant, is the creator of designs that are superfamiliar to all of us like the New York City logo, I Love NY, the DC Comics logo, the Psychedelic poster he made to Bob Dylan in 1966 ( one of the best known images of the 60s and 70s and considered one of the most iconic works of American design), founder of the magazine New York Magazine in 1968 with Clay Felker and was its Director of Integrated until 1977, and is that the good of Milton has been and is very present in the culture of design American of the last century in more than one and varied ways. Glaser is the forerunner of the figure of the Artist Designer that we have seen in previous posts and how it can be Obery nicolas and the ghosts.

At publishing world and the press, together with his partner Walter bernard I create the WBMG design studio and work on the redesign of newspapers such as La Vanguardia, The Washington Post and O Globo, or He gave consultancies on Editorial Design to magazines such as Paris Macht, L'Express, Esquire, L'Europeo, The Washington Post Magazine or the Village Voice. 

  Milton Glaser has not limited himself to designing, but has also spent much of his life dedicated to training in the New York School of Visual ArtsIn addition, he is a member of the Art Director's Club Hall of Fame and the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA).

 When faced with a job, the question is often: Who am I talking to? Who are these people? How will they know? What are your prejudices? What are your expectations? We must not let us lead by our style and personal taste, the important thing is to communicate, the style has to be left out, reflect on what the role of the designer is.

His decalogue on design and life is well known, here I leave it explained in his own hand:

 1. You can only work for people you like.

 It's a curious rule that took me a long time to learn because, in fact, at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Being a professional required not particularly liking the people you worked for, or at least maintaining a distant relationship, which meant no lunch with clients or social encounters. Some years ago I realized that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the valuable and meaningful work I had produced came from caring relationships with clients. I am not talking about professionalism; I'm talking about affection. I'm talking about sharing some common principles with the client. That in fact your vision of life is congruent with that of the client. Otherwise the fight is bitter and hopeless.

 One night I was sitting in my car outside Columbia University, where my wife Shirley was studying anthropology. While I was waiting I was listening to the radio and I heard a reporter ask, "Now that you've reached XNUMX, do you have any advice for our audience on how to prepare for old age?" An irritated voice said, "Why is everyone asking me about old age lately?" I recognized John Cage's voice. I'm sure many of you know who he was — the composer and philosopher who influenced the likes of Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham and the world of music in general. I hardly knew him and admired his contribution to our time. "You know, I don't know how to prepare for old age," he said. “I never had a job, because if you have a job, someday someone will take it out of you and then you will not be ready for old age. For me it has been the same every day since I was twelve. I wake up in the morning and try to get an idea of ​​how to put bread on the table today. It's the same at seventy-five: I wake up every morning and think about how I'm going to put bread on the table today. I am excellently well prepared for old age.

 (This is a section of point 1) In the sixties there was a man named Fritz Perls who was a Gestalt psychologist. Gestalt therapy, derived from the history of art, proposes that you must understand the "whole" before the details. What you must observe is the whole culture, the whole family, and the community, etc. Perls proposed that in all relationships people can be both toxic and enriching to each other. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or enriching in all their relationships, but the combination of two people can produce toxic or enriching consequences. And the important thing I can tell is that there is a test to determine if someone is toxic or enriching in their relationship with you. Here goes the test: You have to spend some time with the person, whether it is having a drink, going to dinner or going to see a sports game. It doesn't matter too much, but in the end see if you feel more or less energetic, if you are tired or if you are strengthened. If you are more tired, then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy, you have been enriched. The test it is almost foolproof and I suggest using it for a lifetime.

 When I started my career I wanted to be a professional. That was my aspiration because the professionals seemed to know everything — not to mention they get paid for it too. Later, after working for a while, I discovered that professionalism itself was limiting. After all, what professionalism means in most cases is "risk reduction." So, if you want to fix your car, you go to a mechanic who knows how to deal with the problem you have. I suppose if you need brain surgery you don't want to have a dumb doctor around inventing a new way to connect your nerve endings. Please do it the way that has worked well in the past.

Unfortunately our field, the so-called creative (I hate that word because it is often misused, I hate the fact that it is used as a noun, can you imagine calling someone creative?), When you do something on a recurring basis to reduce risks or you do it the same way you have done it before, it becomes clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is continual transgression. Professionalism does not lead to transgression because it includes the possibility of error, and if you are a professional your instinct dictates not to fail, but to repeat success. So professionalism as a life aspiration is a limited goal.

 Being a son of modernism I heard this mantra all my life: "less is more." One morning, before getting up, I realized that it was total nonsense, an absurd and quite empty business. But it sounds important because it contains within it a paradox resistant to reason. However it doesn't work when we think about the visual history of the world. If you look at a Persian carpet, you cannot say that less is more because you realize that every part of that carpet, every change in color, every change in shape is absolutely essential for its aesthetic quality. There is no way to prove that a smooth rug is superior. The same with Gaudí's work, the Persian miniatures, the art nouveau and many other things. I have an alternative maxim that I think is more appropriate: “enough is more.

 I think this idea first occurred to me when I was looking at a wonderful watercolor of a bull by Picasso. It was an illustration for a short story by Balzac called "The Unknown Masterpiece." It is a bull expressed in twelve different styles, from a very naturalistic version to an abstraction reduced to a simple line, with all the steps in between. What emerges clearly from looking at this print is that style is irrelevant. In each of those cases, from extreme abstraction to faithful naturalism, all are extraordinary beyond style. It is absurd to be loyal to one style. It doesn't deserve your loyalty. I must say that for old design professionals it is a problem, because the field is driven more than ever by economic interests. The change in style is usually linked to economic factors, as everyone who read Marx knows. Tiredness also occurs when people see too much of the same thing all the time. So every ten years or so there is a stylistic change and things get different. Fonts come and go and the visual system changes a bit. If you have years of work as a designer you have the essential problem of what to do. I mean, after all, you have developed a vocabulary, a form that is your own. It is one of the ways to distinguish yourself from your peers and establish your identity in the field of design. Maintaining your beliefs and preferences becomes a balancing act. The doubt between pursuing change or maintaining your own distinctive shape becomes complicated. We have all known cases of illustrious doctors whose work suddenly went out of style or, more precisely, stuck in time. And there are sad stories like that of Casandre, indisputably the greatest graphic designer of the 20th century, who could not earn a living in his last years and committed suicide.

 The brain is the most active organ in the body. In fact, it is the organ most susceptible to change and regeneration of all organs. I have a friend named Gerard Edelman who is a great scholar in brain studies, who says that the analogy of the brain to the computer is unfortunate. The brain is more like a wild garden that is constantly growing and spreading seeds, regenerating, etc. And he believes that the brain is susceptible — in a way of which we are not fully aware — to every experience and encounter that we have in our life.

I also think that drawing works the same way. I am a huge proponent of drawing, not because I became an illustrator, but because I believe that drawing changes the brain in the same way that finding the right note changes the life of a violinist. Drawing makes you attentive, it makes you pay attention to what you see, which is not so easy.

 Everyone always talks about being confident, believing in what you do. I remember once in yoga class, the teacher said that, spiritually speaking, if you believe that you have reached enlightenment you have just reached your limits. I think it is true in a practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind keep you from opening up to experiment, and this is why I find any firmly held ideological position questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too much in something. Being skeptical and questioning any long-held convictions is essential. Of course, one must be clear about the difference between skepticism and cynicism, because cynicism is as restrictive to one's openness to the world as passionate convictions: they are like twins. Ultimately, solving any problem is more important than being right. There is a sense of self-sufficiency in both the world of art and design. Maybe it starts at school. Art schools often start with Ayn Rand's singular personality model, resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant-garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.

Schools encourage the idea of ​​not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the point is, our job is to come to an agreement. You just have to know where to compromise. The blind pursuit of your own ends at the cost of excluding the possibility that others may be right, does not take into account the fact that in design we always deal with a triad: the client, the audience and yourself. Ideally, through some kind of negotiation all parties win, but self-reliance is often the enemy. Narcissism generally stems from some kind of childhood trauma that shouldn't be deepened. This is a very difficult aspect of human relationships. Some years ago I read a very remarkable thing about love, which also applies to the nature of the relationship with others. It was a quote from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. He said: "Love is the extremely difficult fact of realizing that the other, who is not one, is real." Isn't it fantastic ?! The best conclusion on the subject of love that you can imagine.

 Last year someone gave me for my birthday a lovely book by Roger Rosenblatt called «Aging Gracefully»(Aging gracefully). I didn't realize the title at the time, but it contains a number of rules for aging gracefully. The first rule is the best: 'It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you think. Follow this rule and you will add decades to your life. It doesn't matter if it's sooner or later, if you're here or there, if you said it or not, if you're smart or stupid. If you came out unkempt or bald or if your boss looks at you angry or your boyfriend or girlfriend looks at you pissed off, if you are pissed off. Whether or not you get that promotion or award or house — it doesn't matter. " Wisdom at last. Then I heard a wonderful story that seemed related to rule number ten: A butcher was opening his business one morning and as he was doing so a rabbit poked its head through the door. The butcher was surprised when the rabbit asked, "Do you have cabbage?" The butcher said, "This is a butcher shop, we sell meat, not vegetables." The rabbit skipped away. The next day the butcher was opening his business and the rabbit poked his head out and asked, "Do you have cabbage?" The now angry butcher replied: "Listen to me little rodent, I told you yesterday that we sell meat, not vegetables, and the next time you come here I will grab you by the neck and nail those floppy ears to the ground." The rabbit abruptly disappeared and nothing happened for a week. Then one morning the rabbit poked its head out of the corner and asked, "Do you have nails?" The butcher said, "No." Then the rabbit said, "It has cabbage."

The story of the rabbit is important because it occurred to me that looking for cabbage in a butcher shop would be like looking for ethics in the field of design. It doesn't seem like the best place to find it either. It is interesting to note that in the new AIGA code of ethics (American Institute of Graphic Arts) There is a significant amount of information about behavior towards clients and towards other designers, but not a word about the designer's relationship with the public. The butcher is expected to sell edible meat and not misleading merchandise. I remember reading that during the Stalin years in Russia, everything that was labeled "beef" was actually chicken. I don't want to imagine what was labeled "chicken." We can accept some minimal level of deception, such as being lied to about the fatty content of their burgers, but when the butcher sells us rotten meat we go elsewhere. As designers, do we have less responsibility to our public than a butcher? Anyone interested in registering graphic design should note that the rationale behind a license plate is to protect the public, not the designers or clients. "Do no harm" is a warning to doctors that has to do with their relationship with their patients, not with their colleagues or with the laboratories. If we were enrolled, telling the truth would become more important in our business.

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