Milton Glaser
August 2005
Legendary, brilliant, intellectual, inventive, sweetly naive
These are just some of the words that have been used to describe Milton. I use Miltonâs first name intentionally but with no disrespect. Like John, Paul, Mick, or Keith, his name is instantly recognizable. Milton Glaser was very much the superstar of the graphic design business. He designed the iconic Bob Dylan poster and the I Love New York icon. Milton Glaser passed away in 2020, on his ninety-first birthday. During his long career, Glaser often talked about the confusion many people have about what it means when we use the word âart.â He has suggested that we eliminate the word art and replace it with work. He then came up with the following descriptions: The sad and shoddy stuff of daily life can come under the heading of bad work. Work that meets its intended need honestly and without pretense, we call simply work. Work that is conceived and executed with elegance and rigor, we call good work. Work that goes beyond its functional intention and moves us in deep and mysterious ways, we call great work. Milton Glaser was a creator of great work.
DM One of my favorite things you have authored is a piece titled 12 Steps on the Designerâs Road to Hell. In it, you sought to understand your own willingness to lie. You said that you created this when you were working on doing the illustrations for Danteâs Purgatory. How did you come up with the steps?
MG I was doing the illustrations for the Divine Comedy specifically for the section called Purgatorio, which I was disappointed with. I thought that illustrating the conceptual hell would be more interesting, until I realized that purgatory is where we all are, somewhere between hell and heaven. The great distinction between purgatory and inferno, or hell, is that the people in purgatory know what they have done and the people in hell do not. The souls in hell havenât got the chance of getting up. The people in purgatory somehow can get out of it.
At any rate, I thought that everything that you do is either a step to going into hell or getting out of it. I thought that in our businessâthe communication businessâthe questions become most egregious. We are always in a situation of transmitting ideas to a public. If we apply the idea of doing no harm to what we do because we have some responsibility to that public, we have to look at the nature of the messages that we are sending out into the world. I started with benign things that are quite acceptable to most practicing professionals, such as making a package look larger on a shelf.
DM Thatâs number one.
MG Number one. That comes under the general heading of professional practice, and while it is misrepresentation of a certain kind, that misrepresentation is an attribute of design because you are always dramatizing things. It is something that you could justify and causes little pain.
What I tried to do in the Road to Hell was to increase each problem so at a certain point you realize youâre creating mischief. The question is personal: Where will I stop? What will I not do? I have to ask myself that question when I find myself going down the road a bit. I realized there was a certain point that I would go no farther. Itâs an interesting thing. Itâs very personal. People respond very differently to it in terms of what point they feel that their conscience or their sense of ethics will not permit them to go any deeper. Youâd find that there is by age, there is by vocation, and certainly there is by individual.
DM Here is the full list:
- Designing a package to look bigger on the shelf.
- Doing an ad for a slow, boring film to make it seem like a lighthearted comedy.
- Designing a crest for a new vineyard to suggest that it has been in the business for a long time.
- Designing a jacket for a book whose sexual content you find personally repellent.
- Designing a medal using steel from the World Trade Center to be sold as a profit-making souvenir of September 11.
- Designing an advertising campaign for a company with a history of known discrimination in minority hiring.
- Designing a package for children whose contents you know are low in nutrition value and high in sugar content.
- Designing a line of T-shirts for a manufacturer that employs child labor.
- Designing a promotion for a diet product that you know doesnât work.
- Designing an ad for political candidates whose policies you believe would be harmful to the general public.
- Designing a brochure for an SUV that turned over frequently in emergency conditions known to have killed 150 people.
- Designing an ad for a product whose frequent use could result in the userâs death.
Milton, where do you net out numbers-wise?
MG I hover around the top five before I find that I canât go further if I am really stringent about causing no harm. Itâs almost impossible if you have a firm conviction that you will do nothing to harm another creature. A lot of this is relative. A lot of ethics are relative. On the other hand, causing somebodyâs death doesnât seem to be complex at all. If youâre willing to do it, it means you donât think of them as human.
DM At this stage in your career do you find that itâs easier now to say ânoâ to projects, or have you always adhered to your principles?
MG Iâve always had principles and Iâve always tried to do no harm. I donât think it becomes easier as you get older or more successful. Quite the contrary. Iâm a great believer in simply observing what is, and if you donât want to change your behavior, at least you know what your behavior is. From that point, I think itâs necessary for designers to be aware of what they do when they are participating in misrepresentation or causing someoneâs death. They should simply know thatâs what theyâre doing and not pretend that they have no role. My problem with Ken Garlandâs First Things First manifesto is that it doesnât give people any place to go. It says, âWhy donât you work for schools, universities, cultural institutions, and so on?â without the recognition that they form only 5 percent of the total economic opportunity for designers. The real question is, âWhat are you going to do if you are in business, and youâre participating in a capitalist enterprise which serves to maximize profits above all else?â What is your role in that? Certainly, going elsewhere is an alternative, but in most cases it is a nominal alternative. People donât have the opportunity to go elsewhere. The big question for most of us is staying within the system, understanding that we are in a profit-making capitalist economy. What do you do? That is a more complex issue than simply only working for universities and cultural institutions because most people simply donât have that option.
My problem with First Things First is that it doesnât provide real alternatives for people who have to survive and live, but, on the other hand, it does raise questions regarding the meaning of what you do. I feel ambivalent about the manifesto. I signed it and I would sign it again, but I think it has to present a deeper and more thoughtful idea of what peopleâs alternatives are.
DM You have a book coming out in a few months called The Design of Dissent. Youâve stated that you feel that at this particular moment in time, the dissenting press is all but invisible. How did that happen?
MG What happened is that seven corporations now own the media. Corporations, business, and government are one, and you canât separate the interest of business from the interest of government. There is a collusion between business interests and what the government is interested in. In fact, thereâs no separation between those objectives by and large, and the people and journalists have been intimidated by the fact that if you want to pursue a career in journalism and you get labeled as a troublemaker, youâre not going to have much of a career.
DM I find it interesting that being a troublemaker now can ruin your career when thirty years ago being a troublemaker made your career.
MG The terrible thing about it is that itâs not as overt as one would hope. What people have done is they have voluntarily withdrawn from asking the questions because they realized it was dangerous. The government didnât have to tell them to shut up. Their business didnât even have to tell them to shut up, but they know what happened is, in fact, that theyâve created difficulty.
DM Is there anything that designers can do to change that?
MG I think designers can do only what good citizens do, which is to react, to respond, to publish, to complain, to get out on the streets, to publish manifestos, and to be visible. They canât do more than citizens can do except they have one great advantage: they know something about communication.
DEBORAH KASS
artist
August 2005
Alison Bechdel
May 9, 2016
For some artists, work and life are so intertwined that itâs impossible to tease them apart.
Alison Bechdel is one such creator. Her cartoons and graphic novels lay out the complex intimacies of her life in all their heartbreaking splendor, upending long-held expectations in the process. Her long-running Dykes to Watch Out For is one of the major achievements in the comic-strip genre. Her graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? propelled her work to the mainstream, thanks to their thunderous emotional resonance. Our conversation took place a year after Fun Home was adapted into a Tony Awardâwinning Broadway musical.
DM: You were born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. Your father was a high school English teacher, and he operated a funeral home. Your mother was an actress and a teacher. I believe you were about four years old when you saw your first butch lesbian. What happened?
AB: I was out with my dad on some funeral homeârelated errand in a larger city; we mightâve been in Philadelphia. He had taken me to lunch, and a woman came into the luncheonette who just blew the top of my head off. In seeing this big woman wearing menâs clothes, I recognized a version of myself, and my father recognized that in her too. He said to me, âIs that what you want to look like?â Of course that was exactly what I wanted to look like, and I didnât know it was possible or that anyone else did it. Simultaneously, I was getting the message that it was not okay.
DM: When you were ten years old, you experienced an episode of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It would take you all night to write a simple diary entry. Your mother got involved, and you dictated entries that she would enter into your diary; youâve written that you feel this activity became a kind of template for your life. In what way?
AB: When my mother took dictation for my diary, I became a memoirist because the thing I was most passionate about was the act of writing down...