[Glaser] When I was a kid, I discovered
that I had great prestige in the neighborhood.
My friends could ask me to draw anything,
which turned out to be, almost in all cases, naked ladies.
They would describe the exact position
and physical characteristics, and I could do that on request.
Sort of a short transition between that beginning
and what eventually became my career.
[♪ piano jazz ♪]
Well, people ask me why I chose design, like most American artists.
When I was a kid, I copied comic strips, Walt Disney,
and then I went to the High School of Music & Art,
which gave me a lot of options about what I should be doing,
where I was introduced to the idea
of what was then called commercial art,
which was making things to sell for money.
At the same time, or parallel to that,
was this other idea of fine art,
which was about some other kind of value.
But I never could get the idea through my head
that I could make a living making paintings
that somebody would buy and put in their house.
It just seems so weird to me and so inappropriate for me.
I wanted to do work that was public.
I wanted to do work that was on the street.
I wanted to do work that people saw.
At that point, I had already internalized this idea
that it didn't matter whether I was called an artist
or a designer or an illustrator or whatever else it was.
The core value was always the act of making things,
and the transformation of an idea that you hold in your mind,
that becomes real or material.
That to me, still, is the glory of any creative activity.
[♪]
[Caplan] As the creator of "I Love New York"
and the moving sequel that followed 9/11,
he may be the best-known graphic designer in the world.
But they don't begin to even hint
at the impact and significance of Milton Glaser's work.
He's taken the gifts he had to start with
and developed them along a dazzling variety of lines
that have influenced every serious designer I can think of,
and that have materially affected the way we get information,
the way we buy things, and in fact, the things that we buy.
I've known Milton about 30 years, and I remember being struck
by the mixture of talent, play, and intelligence.
[♪]
[Glaser] I love doing poses.
In fact, all designers love doing poses.
Most of the time, you're working on 5½ × 8½,
and suddenly you have this enormous landscape,
which just gives you a different kind of opportunity and presence.
[♪]
I love music in all forms,
so I'm very responsive to music experientially.
I loved to dance when my feet would still obey my brain
and I think that idea of movement
and a rhythmic response has something to do with
the way you draw and the way you make things.
I always tend to think that the affinities
between all these forms are very constant.
And also, I would like to see whether it's possible to create
the same kind of emotional response in graphics that music has.
Caplan: It occurs to me, that for many people,
this poster is as much the '60s
as anything they know about the '60s.
People very often remember it this way,
whether they were there or not.
[Maxwell] When you think of a Dylan poster,
that really speaks to a generation.
It wasn't his generation, but he was able to
understand what was happening, and see what was happening,
and make work about-- in response to what was happening.
That's very unusual, and I see the same thing in the poster
for Tony Kushner for Angels in America,
to take the raw pain of a generation of gay men who are all dying,
and transform it into a piece of art.
His closeness to our culture, to our civilization,
really allowed him to change the design world.
[Heller] His influence is one of a real star,
and there aren't that many stars in the design field,
particularly in the graphic design field.
Designers are-- their work is seen but they're not necessarily heard.
Because Milton is so articulate, so damn articulate,
um, his voice is requested in many places.
So, between the voice, the work, and the presence,
he's known in many places all over.
And because the world itself, the small world,
is so interested in design,
and design becomes this kind of Esperanto,
Milton speaks the Esperanto well.
[♪ saxophone jazz ♪]
[Glaser] Back in the mid-'70s,
there was a collapse of well-being and morale in this town.
Nobody wanted to be here.
[♪]
And the city and the state
had gotten very apprehensive about what was going on.
[♪]
A guy was hired and he said,
"Look, we got a line, 'I love New York,'
"and we need a visual thing to go with it.
"Can you help us?"
So we did a funny thing with two lozenges
and it was just typographical,
and that was the end of the job, I thought.
And then a day or two later, I was in a taxi,
and I very often carry a scrap of paper with me.
I say, you know, there's a better way to do that:
"I heart N."
Yeah, that would be better.
[♪]
The world was waiting for it.
I explain to students in terms of understanding communication
that the creation of a puzzle is one of the tools that you have
to make people understand things.
When they activate the mind to try to figure something out,
the likelihood is that they will remember and respond to it more
than if they're told something directly.
And in the case "I Love New York," which seems so simple,
"I" is a word, complete word in itself,
heart is a symbol for a feeling, and "N-Y" are initials for a place.
And because of that simple little trick of activating
the problem-solving impulse of the brain,
it stuck in people's mind.
They saw it once; they remembered it.
I have made nothing on "I Heart" or "I Love New York."
Ever.
There've been no cash rewards as a consequence of doing it.
On the other hand, it really makes me feel very, very proud
to have taken part in that shift in the city's consciousness
from being indifferent to itself to realizing we love this place.
[♪]
I've been in this building since 1965, and one of the reasons I'm here
is because it faces the schoolyard outside
so every day, at 12:00, you hear this burst of energetic voices.
I'm always embarrassed when people come in
because it doesn't look like a design office
with beautiful furniture and fancy fixtures.
One thing you'll notice is that I'm sitting,
along with everybody else, in this undifferentiated space,
and I realize that, in part,
that was because of the way I grew up
in a three-room apartment in the Bronx.
My father would be sitting at one corner reading the newspaper,
and my mother would be sitting in the opposite corner.
She would be sewing socks and shirts,
and my sister would be sitting on the couch doing her homework.
Most of the room was occupied by this enormous dining table
that we only use once a year at Passover.
And of course, we were all listening to the radio at the same time.
So ever since then, I've always worked in a room
surrounded by everybody else.
I have never written a memo in my life
because everybody here can hear everything that occurs.
That saves a lot of time.
[Bernard] I remember him on the phone in his office,
and I came down with the new manuscript
and was waiting to talk to him.
He just motioned me over, read the first three paragraphs
while he was talking on the phone, and made a sketch.
Milton said, "We should always operate by interruption."
[Glaser] We had about a hundred people in this building,
if you could imagine such a thing,
running the magazine of the first three or four years.
[Bernard] We were on the floor of this building, the fourth floor.
It has one bathroom and there were 30 or 40 people up there.
It was amazing.
And everybody was just crammed trying to get this magazine
from Monday to Thursday to a printer.
And this is well before computers,
and we would be talking on a Wednesday
in which we didn't have a cover story,
we didn't have this story, and we didn't have that story,
and Clay is on the phone yelling at Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe
or anybody else that was not delivering in time.
Milton was the one who was able to say,
"Don't worry. We can do it."
If something fell through, he'd do the illustration.
He gave me a real education in the first year at New York.
The editor was Clay Felker.
Milton and Clay had founded the magazine themselves.
Milton was the chairman
and the kind of editorial force in terms of service.
He kind of reinvented--
if it had been invented in the first place--
service journalism.
Our mantra was, "Be on the reader's side."
Not the store owner's side, not the subject's side.
If we were gonna do a story on Macy's
or we were gonna do a story on a little food shop,
it wasn't that we were trying to promote that food shop.
It was trying to tell the reader how to cope or to deal with that,
and how to get the best out of it,
especially in the area of teaching them how to
or learning with them how to cope with New York City,
the Pastrami Olympics, and the Underground Gourmet,
and things like that.
This is one of the first covers Milton and I worked on together.
You can see it's October 1968.
The hardest thing was getting Gloria,
who wrote the story, to sit in this Nixon box.
And later, we helped her with the Ms.
There's one thing that, to this day,
Milton and I were too stupid to realize then.
Here we have this magazine
that Gloria created and we're presenting.
Should've been a woman's hand
holding this magazine, and it's not. [chuckling]
[Maxwell] What you had in New York magazine
was what was happening in New York City,
what was alive and kicking in New York City,
and what energy was flowing through,
and what food was coming through,
and what dance was coming through,
and you still see that in New York magazine and Time Out.
It's a way of thinking about life where, um,
without a filter, really.
And you see that in every magazine in every major city in the world.
But that's really only one-- it's one tiny example
of the way that he's changed our lives.
And so the building's had a bit of history connected with it.
It's kind of a bit of a collective.
Now I have a little business with Walter Bernard.
We do editorial design upstairs,
and we've done many, many magazine
and newspaper projects together, and we still do.
And Mirko Ilić.
We worked on The Design of Dissent together.
And while I once had a very big studio--
when I was doing supermarket work, we had 45 people here, and--
but it did not make me happy.
I like the scale of the work as we now do it.
We have very talented people at this studio,
the kind of people that you want to surround yourself with.
We are doing a new identity
under the pressure from these young people
who say we are perceived as being fuddy-duddies.
I'll show you our old identity,
which was based on Russian constructivism.
You see that, contrary to most designs,
that this emphasizes perhaps the least important thing,
which was the number on the building,
and obliterates everything else.
Anyhow, we always liked this because it was perverse.
So, I did this poster for a lecture I did,
but I thought there was something nice
about the symmetry of my name: Mil-ton Gla-ser.
With Molly, we did a little version of it just in one color.
I'm interested in work
that doesn't exactly look as though it was designed.
It just sort of looks as though it happened.
I always like that idea that people have to work
to understand what you're showing them.
Bernard: In 1996, we were asked to redesign Fortune.
When we finished, John Huey, the editor, called and said,
"It's time to rethink the Fortune 500."
So Milton and I literally sat over here working on 500,
and we were both trying different things--
Milton on paper and me on the computer, occasionally.
And I had this thought of only doing it in type,
writing out "The Fortune 500."
And while it was very intriguing,
it didn't have power from a distance.
And Milton and I had also been playing
with various ways of doing the big 5-0-0,
and while some of them were really nice,
they also simply said 500, and Milton said,
"Why don't we combine the big number '5'
and the word 'hundred?' "
Well, it has been used every year since.
It is now the 10th anniversary of that cover.
As John Huey says, it's Eustace Tilley,
and each year it's used, of course, I divide our fee into the years
and I realize that we got paid about three bucks. [laughing]
[Glaser] Thinking and making things, mostly I do in the country.
Assembling and refining things, we do here.
One is solitary, and the others needs interaction.
And I love this part of work.
You have a partner,
you sort of go for a dance and you move one way,
and the partner sort of responds.
It's so much more fun than doing things by yourself.
We are repackaging something for a remarkable Brazilian pianist
called João Carlos Martins, and our idea was
that instead of dealing with Bach in a conventional sense,
that we would deal with the idea of Brazil
and the fact that ethnicity and location
produces a different view of the music.
What I'm thinking is if we just put that in the middle horizontally,
and we have a white panel above and below,
and we just run our typography in that white panel.
[Maas] Uncropped in the middle, okay.
[Glaser] Yeah. Make it run right through the middle.
[Maas] Kind of make it smaller, all right.
[Glaser] We don't do it as finishing something according to plan
because what's nice is it it changes as you do it.
The energy comes out of a work
that has been achieved as a result of making it,
rather than as a premeditation and then completion, you know.
I had designed that logo for this school for the 40th.
So I got the mark I'd done,
and I said just give me a batch of these,
and we just ran them off on our copier.
And I pasted them all down,
and it looked just like a Frank Stella, which wasn't bad.
And then as I was pasting them,
some of the edges were coming up
and says, you know,
it sort of looks more interesting with the edges coming up.
If I were doing this on the computer
and it were not real pieces of paper,
it never would've happened.
You could create this on the computer and the illusion,
but you wouldn't have stumbled into it as a physical act.
[♪]
I've designed in any number of typefaces,
but they're not really typefaces.
They're kind of an idea that, although it's done frequently now,
an idea about form that has been translated through typeface.
The most obvious function of typography is to convey a narrative.
But there's another whole range of activity for typography,
which is more decorative and more instrumental
in communicating atmosphere.
I do a kind of novelty faces which have a sort of premise
and then I use for a headline or something else.
It's a modest intervention into the world of typography.
Now, this is a nice picture,
the two of us going to work on something.
He was great.
I had an odd friendship with Folon.
He spoke no English, I spoke no French,
and we would have these long conversations.
We would talk for hours
without either of us having the other's language.
And then one day, I said,
"You know, there's a good chance
we've been misunderstanding ourselves all these years."
So, to celebrate that misunderstanding, we said, let's do a book,
where I started drawing and you continue it,
and then I continue your drawing, and you continue mine,
and it's a series, in some degree, of misunderstandings.
A little bit like a series of improvisations.
It's like you get a theme going and you just do variations on it.
But it sold very well in Europe.
And of course, for me, it really is a document
of my love and affection for a wonderful, wonderful friend.
[♪]
[Heller] Milton probably has the most international reputation
of any designer living today, in large part because
he was at the center of such culturally explosive things
culturally diverse things, starting in the '60s.
I mean, because of Milton, in large part, psychedelia exists.
Because of Milton, in large part,
this kind of post-modern sensibility exists.
He played a role in all of these things,
and all of these things got exported.
'Course there was that big show
at Pushman Studios early in my career,
which alerted Europeans to the fact
that there was a kind of new, um,
non-Swiss version of design happening in the United States.
And as a result of that, I became relatively well-known
in Europe and South America and so on,
because of the kinds of assignments that I got afterwards.
[Heller] We have done newspapers around the world.
We've done La Vanguardia in Barcelona,
ABC in Madrid,
O Globo in Rio.
We did Espresso in Rome twice,
Barron's twice.
[Glaser] In France, we did L'Express for Sir James Goldsmith,
who also owned a literary magazine called Lire which we did,
and there were innumerable others-- Business Tokyo in Japan.
There was a time when I was popping back and forth
to Europe often, and other places as well.
I would think that one thing that travel did
was simply amplify what was already present,
which was an appetite for whatever the surroundings offered,
whether they were cultural or visual or whatever else.
I mean, you can't very well go to Barcelona
and see Gaudí and come back unchanged.
I mean, there are some things
that travel just affects your nervous system so much
that there's nothing that you can do to avoid it
without even consciously wanting to emulate something.
I would say, in that way,
travel penetrates your consciousness, but not in a rational way.
A woman in Milan named Cristina Taverna
decided to go into the publishing business
as she thought she would publish The Divine Comedy,
and I was disappointed because I wanted to do hell,
but then I realized,
purgatory's much more interesting because that's where we are now.
At any rate, I decided to do it in mono prints,
which I hadn't done for many years,
and so I took a course in Woodstock.
The interesting thing about a mono print--
and the name itself reveals its limitation--
it says you can only get one.
Except if you do it on a piece of paper,
you could rearrange it in the process of re-inking it
so that it gives you a very nice way of doing a second version,
but what you can't do is another print of the same thing.
Works that are too preconceived tend to go dead.
They become inert and less lively.
Work that responds to the peculiarities of the moment
tend to be more energized.
[woman] So, some of those surprises are happy surprises.
[Glaser] Oh, absolutely. You have both experiences.
You know, sometimes it's much better than you thought it was going to be.
Like life itself, sometimes it's much worse.
[woman] That's right.
[both laughing]
[Glaser] I loved doing purgatory,
perhaps the best things I've done in my later life,
basically because they were dark.
But I like the drama of the dark
and I like the idea of the conflict between good and evil.
Finally, you get to a point where you realize
everything is related to its opposite,
that if you have light, there has to be darkness.
If there's truth, there has to be lies.
Everything is defined by its opposite, and they both require exploration.
I mean, if you simply do a drawing, a simple drawing,
you're already dealing with questions of dark and light, right?
[♪]
So much of my work depends on drawing.
I think of drawing as my essential resource,
that that's where my understanding of form comes from,
and whenever I can draw,
because I find it so pleasurable, I will draw.
[♪]
[Peter] You could just sit down in front of a piece of paper
and you would start right away.
What is it about drawing and line--
[Glaser] I am a great believer in drawing as a way of understanding the world.
In fact, I was thinking for the book that you want to do of my drawings--
Peter: I do.
Glaser: --that a title might be Drawing Is Thinking.
[♪]
Tabibian: The idea is to make the hand do what you want.
In his case, the hands have no resistance.
The hands are inanimate tools without will of their own,
and so the translation of image to drawing
is automatic, complete, unmediated, instantaneous.
To see it at work, [chuckles], well...
[Glaser] It's funny, you know, one of the great things
about being able to make pictures and drawings--
it makes you feel like you're really like God.
This drawing derives from a photograph
of Monet and family, and all I really did
was I put a snake in the foreground that clearly wasn't there.
But I must say that it transforms everything.
Once the snake enters it, you see everything shift.
[♪]
[man]] How much of your work is self-initiated?
[Glaser] Less than I would like, actually.
I mean, I am so conditioned to working to a specific problem.
But every once in a while, I have the opportunity
to sort of do a cycle of work that I basically start myself.
The Monet project was pretty extensive.
There were over 50 drawings.
All of these are events that could've happened
but didn't necessarily.
Monet's dog. I don't know if he had a dog.
[man] He does now. [Glaser chuckles]
[Glaser] The truth is that I have been looking for
a definition of what art is all my life
without fully understanding exactly what it encompasses,
but, in the course of doing a speech,
I looked up several references to what art was,
and I found one by Horace, who's a critic and poet
back in Roman times first century, so--
and he had this great, great line.
He said, "The purpose of art is to inform and delight."
And I thought wow, it can't get much better than that.
[Heller] Going back to the Bauhaus, there was this thing called
the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art.
And I think that Milton comes out of that
directly or indirectly looking at art as art.
And so the commercial is certainly one part of it
that requires certain requisites, and then the artist part of him,
the pure artist part of him, requires other requisites.
But they're really joined. I mean, you can't separate the two.
He might do pictures of his cats that are quite beautiful,
and have no place in a graphic design annual,
but at the same time,
he injects all of that artistic humanity into everything he does.
[Glaser] I just thought of that project, of doing Piero's,
and I realized that if I'm simply copying Piero's,
what value does it then have?
And then I realized, if you looked at Piero as nature,
like you're drawing a tree, you don't feel as though
you're obliged to represent that tree.
But then you just have an idea that the tree initiates.
And so, with the Piero projects, that's what I did.
I sort of started drawing as though I were
looking through a window at Piero, so...
[♪]
Otherwise, I would have been embarrassed to begin.
[♪]
Gombrich, in his great book, he says,
"There is no art; there are only artists."
And you say, "Well, wait a minute; what, exactly--?"
And what he meant, of course,
is that what art is becomes defined generationally.
Everybody's sort of redefined what art is,
because there's no then there, right?
It is, in fact, what society determines at any moment in history.
And the great enemy of art, of course,
is the institutionalization of belief, like style or like taste.
We say, "Well, we finally got to that.
"Here we are. This is really art."
And once that has-- that happens, that crystallization of belief,
we're saying, "Okay, I got it now.
"We put two yellows, one red, and three of the green guys."
Once that happens, you realize that that becomes a limitation, right?
When I had my show very early at the Museum of Modern Art
that Emilio Ambasz had arranged,
there was one large poster, the big nude,
that didn't have any typography on it.
The curator of prints came in,
he said, "You can't show that.
"It doesn't have any typography in it."
He says, "So what?"
"Well, that makes it a print,
"and that comes under my jurisdiction,
"and I don't want that as representing the print."
I said, "I can't believe it."
What I have always hated in my life is the parochialization of art,
making it a special activity unrelated to other activities.
It finally ends up as being an instrument for social enhancement
and not what it really is, which was an expression
of a very fundamental instinct of the species.
There's a wonderful book that I have quoted for most of my life
by Lewis Hyde called The Gift,
and it basically says that this gift-giving,
which occurs in primitive cultures from one tribe to another,
which is a device for pacifying others and establishing relationship,
is what artists do.
They basically create the commonalities,
the symbolism, so that people feel as though
they have some relationship to one another.
When people don't feel that they have that relationship,
they kill each other,
so that row of providing common ground is absolutely essential to civilization.
The nice thing about it is
there's always a next plateau of understanding.
It's very exciting to think that you don't run out, right?
That history doesn't run out, that art doesn't run out,
and so you just, you go as far as you can,
and then leave some room for the next guy.
[♪ relaxing piano music ♪]
In junior high school, when I was deciding whether
to go to Bronx Science or music and art,
and I had a very encouraging science teacher,
and I made the decision that I would go to music and art.
And shortly after I'd made that decision,
he stopped me in the hall one day.
He said, "I wanna talk to you." And my heart sank.
So we went into his office and he reached down into his desk,
and he pulled out a box of French conte crayons.
He gave it to me and he said, "Do good work."
To some degree, everything I do has been supported by this idea
that the only way I could really pay him back
was to do good work.
[♪]
Well, this is my old high school, a high school of music and art.
I received an exceedingly good education there.
And a few years ago, the principal, Kim Bruno,
asked me if I would do a new identity for the school.
Now, the problem seemed to be the name of the school itself,
which, if you can believe it,
is the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.
My suggestion was that they change the name to LaGuardia Arts.
And on that basis, I proceeded to design a logo
that is based on the idea of musical score,
and it is the only logo that can actually be sung.
[singing] ♪ La... ♪
But I entered the school at 15 because I came from junior high school.
After there, I got into Cooper Union, and I must say,
I received a wonderful, wonderful education.
Well, Push Pin grew out of an attempt
to recreate the spirit and the energy
of Cooper Union while we were students there.
It was years later, after I had come back
from Italy on my Fulbright,
that we all decided we would like to continue to work together.
[Heller] Push Pin gathered together some very demonstrative personalities:
Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, as the leaders,
Ed Sorel was involved, and others.
And it created a stylistic buzz. It created an attitude.
Push Pin was like the epitome of fun in design.
[Glaser] We worked from a different point of view.
It was an eclectic point of view
that celebrated ornament and drawing and narration,
all the things that the modernists taught us to hate.
[Heller] In that sense, Push Pin opened a door into eclecticism
that no other firm had done, and did so in a sophisticated way.
[♪]
Push Pin had, as a strategy,
to draw on these historical forms, these passé forms,
bring them together, meld them, mold them,
and make them into something that was highly contemporary.
[Glaser] I felt, actually, that our success had defined us too much.
Push Pin had become a style, and I don't trust styles.
And above all, I don't want to be encapsulated in a style.
So, it felt to me as though I would have to redefine myself.
I really started Milton Glaser Inc. at that time,
began to move into areas of restaurant design for Joe Bau,
supermarket design for Sir James Goldsmith,
and that required really transforming
a small studio into a large studio,
and still staying with all the activities of New York magazine,
which included acquiring the Village Voice
and starting up New West magazine on--
and we were very ambitious through all of that.
It was a very, very busy time.
[♪]
And that kept me going for a good long time,
until Murdoch bought New York and we left,
and I continued to do supermarkets for about 20 years.
I've spent a large part of my life doing supermarkets.
And I learned a lot from the act of doing that.
I'm very happy with the work we did on supermarkets
because it made life better for a lot of people.
It made things clearer.
It made the navigation through the market
more understandable, and less fatiguing.
Also because we really had to
talk to your average American all over the country,
and that was very, very instructive.
[♪]
A lot of the work we do is sort of for--
aimed at a thin hierarchy of design-interested personalities,
and other designers, and fancy people as well.
But those years designing supermarkets were very fundamental
in shaping my perception on how to communicate cleanly.
At that book event, at least eight people
came over to me at the event in publishing--
Man: Yes.
Glaser: --to have said, I studied with you back 40 years ago.
I love to teach.
I don't think I have an obligation to teach.
I teach because I feel better when I teach
as when I don't teach.
Glaser: But I think what you've done in this presentation--
you've really got that.
It is withholding. It doesn't give you everything.
It's just one of the secrets of design.
[Glaser] People always ask me why I teach, and, of course,
the fact that people ask that question in itself
just indicates the kind of low-voltage contempt
that teaching is actually held in in America.
The idea of being a teacher is that you've got to pass it on.
You learn something; you develop some insights;
your experience can be transmitted and that is the nature of civilization.
[Heller] Milton's summer program is a monumental experience
for anybody who comes into the programs.
He draws people from all over the profession.
This is not somebody just coming to school.
These are people who've been working for years.
And what he does is he gives them this wisdom,
as well as tests them.
His curriculum is a constant-- let's call it boot camp.
I mean, he takes a problem and he has people solve it
in a very short amount of time,
so it's really testing both sides of the brain at once.
And if they can succeed, great. If they fail, even greater
because then you get his wholehearted wisdom.
Glaser: I wanna just-
[Maxwell] I took his class when I was 17.
I began to realize we were not designing objects, like book covers.
We were redesigning the world.
I don't think I've ever heard him say we have a responsibility.
It swims into the consciousness by his actions.
To have spent time with him and not feel responsibility
would've been to not be paying attention.
[Heller] The ripple effect that Milton has had is enormous.
People who come out of those programs,
there are-- you know, there are certain epiphanies that they have,
and they go back into their jobs with this new inspiration.
Or, as our students do, they go back into the world
with a tool kit that they can draw on at any given time.
It's not a specific thing, necessarily.
But in the case of one of our students, Deborah Adler,
her thesis project was to repackage and redesign prescription drugs.
[Adler] My grandmother was taking an antibiotic,
which is what my grandfather was taking.
Her name is Helen Adler and his name is Herman Adler,
and she accidentally took his drug, which is a higher dosage.
Nothing bad happened other than the fact that she got dizzy,
but it was enough to make me aware of the packaging.
[Glaser] At one point, we thought it should be something
that the federal government would mandate,
and it wasn't going to happen.
The government would never get behind it.
It would take 35 years for anything to happen and so on.
So, I had a connection to Target--
[Heller] --who then ultimately bought the whole concept,
and rolled out a new prescription drug package
that has become the paradigm of design
in the service of society and the service of culture.
I mean, without Milton's aid and enthusiasm,
this would never have happened.
And this is the highest bar.
There are middle bars where, thanks to Milton,
people are just practicing in a different, more thoughtful way.
It's not about design as service.
It's design as cultural value.
[Glaser] I learned a lot about teaching
from studying with Giorgio Morandi years ago.
What the students get from a good teacher is not instruction.
What they get is a demonstration of someone's view of life.
I mean, that's what you teach.
You teach a way of perceiving the world.
His entire life was about the work.
There was nothing else.
I thought, no matter what you're doing,
whether it's painting or typography
or even working as a waiter in a restaurant,
that complete commitment is transformative.
I mean, it makes you different
when you truly commit to what you're doing.
I went to Italy having never left home before.
I guess I was 20 or 21, you know, smart-ass Jewish kid,
who really figured I knew the way the world worked.
And then I went to Italy,
and I realized that I didn't know anything about anything.
And it gave me this sense of the continuity
of human history, of the human experience,
I mean, going from, you know, Romanesque to the Gothic to the--
[man] It's a kind of old place.
[Glaser] Right, it's an old place. And it's all-
but more importantly, it's all visible.
It really shifted me from the idea of modernism
as being the only available resource
to draw on for a young designer.
I suddenly realized history was not the enemy,
that you could use anything as raw material to make something.
That was a great, great transformation for me,
and it's persisted to this day.
I mean, in that sense, Italy was very important
to changing my view of, well, the importance of food.
My mother was a terrible cook.
I got to Bologna, the best place for eating in Italy,
and suddenly I understood something
that I'd never learned in the Bronx.
[Tabibian] There were several things about his mother's spaghetti recipe.
She would take a pound of Mueller spaghetti,
which was, as a brand,
much less intimidating than Buitoni or Rozoni.
It sort of sounded a little Jewish to my mother.
And she would boil it in a big aluminum pot for about an hour.
[Tabibian] And she puts on it some Velveeta cheese.
And about a half cup of Heinz tomato ketchup.
And, uh, bakes it. Bakes!
And then allowed to cool, and she would de-mold it,
take it out, and sort of looked like the dome of St. Peters.
Bravo. Guess what happens next?
And then she would slice it--
And fries it!
--and fry it in chicken fat.
[Tabibian] From that to Ristorante Diana in Bologna, it's a long way.
It's a very long way.
One thing I can tell you about Milton
uh, is that he loves food, and he loves to have, uh, lunch.
[Glaser] Okay, so here we are
at one of the great dim sum palaces in Chinatown.
My favorite way of eating-- a lot of little things.
[Bernard] When he was at New York magazine, he had a--
several regular lunches with Jerome Snyder,
who was his partner at The Underground Gourmet.
So they would invite three or four people,
and we'd go to some Polish delicatessen
or cheap coffee shop or whatever,
but we'd always have these wonderful lunches
because we'd have to sample everything on the menu.
[Glaser] So what you would do is
you would go into an ethnic neighborhood.
You would always find small restaurants
catering to the local community.
It was the first time anyone had ever written about cheap restaurants,
because cheap restaurants don't advertise in magazines.
But the great thing about it
was that it really had a profound effect on eating patterns in New York
because we made it acceptable to the middle class
to eat in a cheap restaurant.
And I think maybe that was the best thing I ever did because it began--
We were certainly not solely responsible,
but it began that shift of the city's awareness
of this incredible reservoir of interesting food
that was in this city already.
And then the realization of the diversity and the richness
of this available, good-quality food.
Because if you went in a Hungarian neighborhood,
they were not going to be serving lousy Hungarian food.
But that idea that it was okay to go to a cheap dive,
to have a good meal, was really something that
The Underground Gourmet brought to the surface,
and a lot of things happened as a consequence of that.
[woman] Do you still enjoy going to offbeat, inexpensive restaurants?
[Glaser] Oh, I love-- I love going to cheesy restaurants.
There are a couple in my neighborhood down at 32nd street,
but I'm not gonna tell you what they are.
Woman: No, no. It would ruin them.
[Glaser] Yeah, absolutely.
[♪]
[Tabibian] In his work, food is a major issue,
[♪]
because for him, food is nurture.
Food is warmth.
Food is generosity.
Food is sharing.
[Glaser] I experience the same satisfaction
from preparing any dish that requires cutting
and chopping and arranging as I do when I'm drawing.
I mean, I don't-- I don't view those as different kinds of experiences.
[Caplan] Milton's love affair with and his expertness in food
has informed his design of menus, restaurant interiors,
and for that matter, restaurant concepts.
[♪]
[Glaser] That's the big nose.
This was a disreputable old Irish bar, and to Shelly Fireman's credit,
he saw that it was a, uh, unpolished diamond.
And so we completely ripped it apart
and designed it so that it would have a series of unfolding experiences:
the bar, informal and friendly.
We have the grand room,
which is a paraphrase of the academia where I studied in Bologna.
So you have this sky light, this north light.
I hired a painter named Elliot Levine
to do these fake Renaissance details.
And then I also commissioned a friend of mine, Jordan Stecko,
to do enlargements of details of the body
to signal the idea this is an art school.
I don't know how many people get that
but I like the idea that if they're eating here for ten years,
one day you look up and you say, "Oh, I get it."
I love that kind of sustained mystery.
This thing, I guess they've remade into fancy apartments, huh?
Woman: Yeah.
Glaser: This old building? That's a new development.
It really was once a refuge for people
who couldn't pay adequate rents.
We got our apartment, which was a floor-through,
for $135 a month.
That wouldn't get you very much in New York these days.
Well, here. Here is a sadness.
I was gonna show you my old building.
It's gone.
54 St. Mark's Place used to be here.
Gone. [laughing]
Absolutely and completely gone.
[Shirley] When we returned from Rome,
we found an apartment on St. Mark's Place
where we stayed for 18 years.
And then, we bought this apartment 30 years ago.
[Glaser] What we have on the walls here
are my first purchase in the realm of art,
which was a Picasso lithograph,
magnificent one, when he was influenced by Ang,
and an odd painting of a man on a fantastically armored horse
that I bought while we were living in Rome
in a flea market for two dollars
that was covered over with
a crudely drawn cowboy on horseback.
I took it up to the house and I told Shirley,
"We have something under this, and I think it might be Uccello."
So I cleaned it with turpentine,
because I saw that the painting underneath was in egg tempera,
and this extraordinary figure emerged.
Maybe 10 years later, I was looking at a book
of Jacopo Bellini's and I found the exact drawing.
Whether it's Bellini or not is arguable, but we like to think it is.
[♪]
[Shirley] Of all of the things that we've collected,
the African has lasted longer and deeper.
[♪]
[Glaser] In African culture, the word for "good"
and the word for "beautiful" are identical, which is--
that link to the notion of beauty and good,
which we sort of skirt about,
is actually explicit in African culture.
[Shirley] One of my friends said that it made her very uncomfortable,
having all these stare at her.
They don't make me uncomfortable at all.
They're my friends.
[Glaser] When we come home, we feel as though we're at a party.
I've done any number of children's books with my wife Shirley
and that's always been an interesting back-and-forth process.
At the end, I always felt
that the conversation made for a much better product
than I could have done with a more compliant partner.
The first year we were married,
we started working on a children's book called If Apples Had Teeth.
We enjoyed that experience so much
that 40 years later, we did another one.
[both laughing]
At any rate, that was The Alphazeds.
We helped in the color palette;
we designed the basic logo in all their communications;
we designed the landings.
Oh, this is a wall made of steel but gilded in copper,
and it reflects all the light coming in through the windows,
and then at night, has very different characteristics.
It's basically based on the Tibetan cloud drawings that I discovered,
and then rolled so that the forms would open up all along the way.
We had no idea what it was gonna look like until it was installed.
That's a very different character.
Woman: Very beautiful. Very mysterious.
Glaser: That's right.
This opportunity was great
to actually learn more about Tibet, particularly in the Himalayas.
I mean, my interest has always been
not about the differences in art, but their commonalities,
and what you find is, whatever you've learned
goes into the next project.
So I don't look at these so much as being separate things
but rather as a kind of continuum.
I've always had an interest, at least, as most people do,
in what is called a spiritual side of life.
I mean, that intersection between religion and belief,
and making art, and a sense of community,
and all those things that are involved,
a departure from the material world.
All of that has shaped the kind of interest,
um, even though it hasn't coalesced into hard belief.
I think you have to hold your beliefs lightly.
Lang: Unexpected pleasure.
Glaser: Peter, you know George Lang.
Lang: I do.
About, uh, 1990 or so, my friend and partner, Ronald Lauder,
decided to buy something extraordinary in Budapest,
this incredible restaurant complex called Gundel.
And the first thing was, you know, what's going to be the logo?
And of course, the first thought I had was Milton.
And I found a letter and the menu
and a couple of other things from the beginning of the century
and it had a elephant on it.
And Milton, about two weeks later, made a presentation.
[♪]
Amazingly, Milton, without knowing anything about it,
came up with the same logo which was there 100 years ago.
[♪]
Milton has two things.
He's able to put together the technical equipment
of creating things, actually making it,
knowing what you have to worry about,
and something else, spirit, which comes from heaven knows where.
[♪ dramatic orchestra finale ♪]
[Vanden Heuvel] When you're sitting with Milton,
you have one of the graphic geniuses of,
not only the United States, but of the world in my view.
So I have to admit that in those first few meetings many years ago--
I mean, I've been working closely with Milton since '85.
He's intimidating. He can be intimidating because
it's the breath of an intellect, allied with a vision.
And so in those first few meetings, was I a partner in that?
Probably not.
I was more a disciple and a student, and one remains that,
but what becomes clear with Milton
is that there is a sweetness there, and there is a humanity,
and there is a spirit of wanting to be of help
in bringing your ideas and your message
with more power to a broader audience.
So it kind of melts away the fear factor,
which is something that Milton's always working against anyway.
He and I've had long talks about the importance of fighting fear,
which is so prevalent in these times.
He has a great sense of the nation's history
and its place in our culture and politics,
and so he has that in the back of his mind
that the redesign be in sync with that spirit.
And I think the great designers
have that sense of continuity and change,
and Milton has that as an abiding vision.
He's so articulate, so there's a great kind of dynamism
between the visual product he'll show you
and as he explains it.
And those meetings are wonderful.
Occasionally, he'll email a note, which is also great to get,
but to hear him explain the vision is priceless.
[chuckling]
[Bernard] For a while now, he's wanted to work with people that he likes.
He's always had that feeling, but-- but I think, at times,
he did things that, you know, were necessary.
Glaser: When I was younger, I could do anything.
Peter: Yeah, you told me this was an evolving problem and an evolving--
[Glaser] I could do anything. I could make a fruit pie outta shit.
I mean, there was nothing I wouldn't--
Because I felt, geez, I can learn something doing this.
Now, I realize, I can do very little with anyone
where I don't feel sympathetic.
[Glaser] There were two guys who came to see me
about 15 years ago, Tom Potter and Steve Hindy.
It was a time at the beginning of the microbreweries,
and they wanted to call it the Brooklyn Eagle Beer,
and I said, "The first thing I can tell you
"is since you can basically own the entire burrow, call it Brooklyn.
"You have an extraordinary resonance and history."
[Hindy] I had a very difficult time meeting this guy.
The first time I called his office, his secretary, Eva,
basically told me to get lost. She said, uh--
[Glaser] Can't believe this story.
[Hindy] "Do you know who Milton is?"
And I said, "Yeah, I hear he's pretty good.
"I'd like to talk to him."
And she said, "Wait,
"he doesn't just talk to anyone who calls here."
Uh, and so--
Glaser: Well, we did get a lot of crank calls during that period, I mean.
[Hindy] It, uh, sort of spurred me on,
so I started calling there every day and badgering Eva.
One day she said to me,
"You're not gonna give up, are you?"
And I said, "No, I want to talk to Milton Glaser."
She said, "Okay, here he is." Put him on the phone.
So I kinda blurted out my idea about starting a Brooklyn Brewery,
and Milton said, "Wow, that sounds like fun.
"Why don't you come in? We'll talk."
[chuckling]
[Glaser] Amusing story.
And also why I don't seem to get as much work as I'd like.
[both chuckling]
Glaser: Well, I have to admit,
I've been at so many startups that have failed,
I had no idea we would get this far.
Hindy: Yeah.
Glaser: And the company is in such wonderful shape.
Hindy: And now we're looking to build a brewery, uh,
twice as big as this.
Glaser: That's fantastic.
[Hindy] Be the next step.
[Glaser] This was a first: a bottle that people think
is a reference to the Brooklyn Dodgers,
but there was no letter form that looked this way.
They just had the words "Brooklyn Dodgers" in normal type.
However, people are so convinced
that it has some reference to the uniform
that the association is convincing.
Hindy: I think it's time for a beer.
Glaser: Ah, that's a good idea.
[chuckling]
[Glaser] What we like-- what I like--
is basically working on all levels of the culture
from the high to the low
because the idea behind all of that
is that whatever the level is,
excellence can always exist on that level.
So, a good ham and cheese sandwich
is really every bit as good as a crème brûlée.
In fact, it's better than a crème brûlée,
but each form requires its own level
of intelligence and passion.
[♪]
[Glaser] The idea was to do a mural above this entryway,
and I saw that the lights that they had chosen
create this series of arches.
Any mural you put up there would, in effect, be destroyed by the lights,
so I used that arch thematically so that would look as though
you had actually planned on it.
The race starts slowly, but the designs on these wheels
were based on an idea that Marcel Duchamp had.
He made these rotoscopes.
If you look at them, the objects and the forms
seem to be moving independently of one another,
and as they accelerate, they sort of change their meaning.
[Kenny] what happens in the end is that the people,
the faculty, the staff, the students,
are profoundly, profoundly affected by what happens in the design.
In the end, the most important audience, I think, is internal.
The way they feel about the place
makes a difference in their learning experience.
This September, Stony Brook
will take over Southampton Campus from Long Island University.
[Glaser] So, we're thinking of creating a kind of austere, sustainable place,
but it's some combination of the WPA, the Peace Corps, the Kibbutz.
Well, here are some of the signs we're playing with for the new campus,
and we introduce this idea of a little wind power,
the whirligig, to get the idea
that we're concerned about sustainable energy.
[Kenny] It happens you and I've
been talking forever about ecological sustainability
and how we get over to this generation of students.
It has to be not just what they get in class
but the way their entire experience happens.
And that's why your thinking about it is shaping of what we're doing.
You're not just about pictures; you're not just about designs.
You're about ideas; you're about words.
[Glaser] We need that in the world these days.
We need a more generous view of what life and education is about.
People are so anxious to sacrifice for what they believe in now
that it's the right moment for this sort of thing.
But potentially at least, it could be the biggest,
in terms of its impact,
meaning the biggest thing that I've ever worked on.
We are in a show at the School of Visual Arts
that is based on a book I did with Mirko Ilic
called The Design of Dissent.
More than anything else,
what you feel is the energy of commitment.
People really care about things that are in the air.
It's so different from the persuasion of most advertising that you see
that, uh, it's refreshing.
In New York, the design profession
is mostly used by commercial purposes.
That's what pays it.
There is art you do free
and there is design you do for money.
He has come to the conclusion
that essentially the job of advertising is to lie.
[Glaser] The saddest thing is that, when people experience television
and know that it's lying--
let's just say, or misrepresenting the advertising that you see--
they'll still go out and buy the product.
And I think this has a real correlation between
what has happened in American politics.
A couple weeks ago, I had a roll of vinyl bags in my closet
that someone had bought for us at a dollar store.
And it was extremely cheap plastic,
so that when you pulled it out of the box, it tore,
and you could just puncture it with your hand.
I said, "These are the worst, stupid, flimsiest thing!"
And I saw that the name of it was Super Tough Vinyl Bags.
[audience laughing]
Just like [indistinct].
[audience laughing]
One thing we have learned is that all you have to do
is repeat it often enough, right?
I know when I was growing up in the Bronx--
I was born in 1929, and I grew up in
what was basically a left-wing neighborhood in the Bronx.
It was called Little Moscow at the time.
[audience chuckling]
[insdistinct], which was basically a kind of socialist enclave,
by people who'd come from Europe
and who were convinced that they could invent a better life.
And everybody was a political activist because that's what you did.
You woke up in the morning,
and you went out and you distributed leaflets.
That was just normal.
[audience laughing]
The accomplishment of the '60s made us so full of naïve enthusiasm
about the fact that love could conquer all
and that all you had to do is love,
and the Civil Rights Movement
and the Anti-War Movement,
and all these assertions of the young saying it's all possible
was an extraordinary moment in time.
And here we are at a moment in time
where all of that view has been swept away.
The triumph, I would say,
of a dark vision of meanness, of stupidity, of arrogance.
That seems to be so pervasive all over the world, not only--
not only in Washington.
But you realize things change, and not necessarily for the better.
Then it's simply a condition that you have to play your part,
and your part is to be on this side of the line.
I mean, that's my view of it.
[Bernard] Milton is now starting projects
and he'll take them to someone
the way he did buttons for the nation.
The nation didn't commission buttons.
Milton said, "You've gotta start doing this."
[Vanden Heuvel] What he has done beyond,
above and beyond the pro bono
work with the design of the magazine
is in these last years he's had these great ideas,
and he comes-- came to us with this button series.
He will send them, you know, in the middle of the night or--
and they're so much a part of what he's thinking about.
Facts not fear.
That is so much part of what Milton believes:
the danger of a kind of Messianic belief system--
much more important to inform and enlighten.
So, Milton has sent us a slew of buttons
over these last few years
which we publish in the magazine and our readers devour,
and we take them to student conferences and students love them,
and it's always wonderful to see people wearing them--
not just Nation readers, but they move around.
[Bernard] If you look at any of his recent work,
he's increasingly thinking about world issues
and wants to design in a way
that can help the causes that he's interested in.
[Heller] What he brings to this conversation
is more than idealism; it's true eloquence.
It's more than a doctrinaire philosophy;
it's a humanist philosophy.
And after all these years of practicing,
of seeing design go up and down,
graphic design go up and down as a practice of importance,
he wants to imbue it with a sense of a real gravitas.
[Glaser] Starting four or five years ago,
I realized I didn't have the right to be indifferent
or to ignore what was going on.
And since I have some talent for communicating ideas,
I thought I might use that talent
or else feel like a real jerk for the rest of my life.
[Tabibian] Milton, he's got qualities and characteristics
that are both great and contradictory.
He and his wife lead a perfectly private life.
[Glaser] How are ya?
[♪]
[Tabibian] He has a house in Woodstock, New York.
He reproduced Claude Monet's studio.
So he's very, very private in his personal life,
but he's the most public man in New York.
But public for the public good.
[Glaser] It isn't possible for me
to separate my work from my life in general,
and certainly not my life from this city.
Here you have these extraordinary strands of differences,
existing simultaneously and, in some curious way, advantageously.
So it's all of the people who live here.
There really is nothing like it.
I mean, it does-- New York does the job that America's supposed to do.
It really takes everybody and not only accepts them
but responds to them, and that's a big deal.
I mean, if you come to New York from another place,
nobody forces you to become a New Yorker
in terms of an attitude or a spirit.
It-- the city is enormously accommodating.
Not to mention the extraordinary gift
that the city gives you of education.
This is the best town in the world to be educated.
The number of schools, the amount of free events,
lectures, classes--
I mean, no place on earth!
You can study anything that you want,
any time, anywhere in this city.
All of these opportunities-- being able to go to the Metropolitan,
being able to study at the Art Students League,
being able to go to a superb high school
like the High School of Music & Art--
all of that sort of contributed to my well-being,
to my understanding, to my history, to my passion.
It's not possible.
It would not have been possible for me to have been what I am
and to have done what I've done any place else on earth.
This is the town that made it possible.
[♪]