Milton Glaser - Blog

Transcript of conversation with Milton Glaser

Music in

Jo Reed:  Well, I Love New York. It's probably the most iconic logo and it's hard to imagine how it could be simpler. How did that come to be?

Milton Glaser: Design and every other human activity really engages both parts of your  brain, the rational, objective, logical part, which you develop by reading and teaching and talking and all the rest of them, and then the intuitive part.  It is the- sort of the meeting of those two impulses or two natures of the brain that produces everything and it's nice to have both of them functional. So there are a lot of people who are very rational, very objective, and have an undeveloped imagination very often they are in opposition with it as you know and it's not new, but I've always been able to accept what I don't know rationally and objectively and let my intuition work out the details. The I Love New York--  And I've told this story; I did a solution for it. I thought it was going to be a six-week project. I did a typographical something. The board of commerce or whatever accepted it. My friend, Bill Doyle, who brought it to me said, "They've accepted it. Why don't you just do some layouts with it?"  And the next day I was in a cab and I said, "That's not good enough" and I just scribbled the little "I heart New York." I called him and he said, "Oh, they've met already. They've approved it. Don't bug her."  I said, "Let me come over" and I said, "Look."  And I showed it to him. He said, "You're right. That's better."  He went back to the board, one of those few cases where something that already had been accepted was then put aside and something else replaced it. So I don't know the answer to the question  where the ideas come from.... beats the hell out of me.
 Music out