DRAWING BOARD

The graphic designer Milton Glaser made America cool again.

- ADAM GOPNIK

Each age has its own kinds of heroes and heroines. Sportswriters and disk jockeys once had profiles as sharply etched as the heads on Mt. Rushmore, and everyone knew who Jimmy Cannon and Symphony Sid were. (Symphony who?) There was a time, too, when art directors and commercial illustrators were major figures, their studios and styles known by sight. In the postwar era, when George Lois made covers at Esquire, Alex Liberman did layouts at Vogue, and Alexey Brodovitch oversaw all at Harper’s Bazaar, such figures were the great switching stations between avant-garde experiment and the commercial world. These were our impresarios of style, and honored as such.

No art director’s work was more influential or instantly identifiable than that of Milton Glaser. The extent of that style, which adorned books and records and movies—and is revealed in a new anthology from Monacelli, courtesy of Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber, titled simply “Milton Glaser: Pop”—is astounding. Glaser was famous as the co-founder and original design director of New York and as a creator of two images that helped define two decades. One was the 1966 poster of Bob Dylan that showed him with snakelike hair blossoming into a skein of rainbows. The other was the 1976 “I♥NY” logo— which was commissioned by the State of New York but promptly adopted as a local symbol of the city, and, being keyed to the city’s unexpected revival, is the closest thing there has ever been to a logo that changed social history.