Remembering Milton Glaser: an esteemed panel honours the graphic design legend in online event

A free online event hosted by The Cooper Union gathers an esteemed panel of designers to discuss the life and legacy of Milton Glaser, eight months after his death. Taking place this Wednesday 24 February, Remembering Milton Glaser will feature Walter Bernard, Gail Anderson, Steven Heller, Ellen Lupton, Stephen Doyle, Steve Hindy, Mirko Ilić, Jonathan Key and Zipeng Zhu, not to mention Glaser’s co-founders in Push Pin Studios, Seymour Chwast and Reynold Ruffins. Each has a personal and professional link to Glaser, and, in turn, remarkable stories to share about him and his work.

The panel discussion sets out to remember his “outsized impact” on his field of graphic design and beyond, surveying his vast body of work in the context of its time, and the lasting impression it left in the years that followed.

Glaser graduated from the Cooper Union in 1951, and later in life became a professor and trustee emeritus for the school. After graduation, he set up Push Pin Studios with his friends and classmates Chwast, Ruffins and Edward Sorel. It is not hyperbolic to say the studio helped define the following era of design and its place in the commercial world. In our obituary, we wrote how the graphic design and illustration studio “provided a fresh counterpoint to both the numbing rigidity of modernism, and the rote sentimental realism of commercial illustration”.

The designer went on to found New York Magazine in 1968, start his own studio in 1974, create arguably “the most frequently imitated logo design in human history” in I ❤ NY, and the iconic AIDS symbol and poster for the World Health Organisation’s International in 1987. In 2009 he received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama. In a nearly 70-year career there is plenty more in between to discuss, which the panel hopes to explore in tribute.

The event will premiere on YouTube; you can register to attend here and a link will be sent the morning of the 24 February.