 and easier in some ways to gain access to it. It's an extraordinary complex system. I don't understand how it doesn't fall down entirely one day. So many things going on at once. Can you imagine taking a cab and paying $35 to arrive at your destination? It used to cost $0.35. In every way, the city is different, largely because you yourself are different. And your expectations are different. It's always been both a pleasure to be here and an environment that could be extremely threatening and negative. But what it does have that no other place on earth is a population of the most extraordinary people you'll find anywhere. And that, of course, is one of the great rewards of being here. There's always a sense that when I talk to people, they're like, I always feel like I missed out on the New York that they had. They're always like, oh, 10 years ago. Do you feel like that's always been the case? Or do you feel like there was a time where you really felt the best here? Or has it kind of morphed over time? Well, I can't speak for everybody because everybody has a different experience. I know that you can't anticipate what's going to happen in this city. I mean, there are broad movements and events and cycles. But the truth of the matter is that opportunity for anything arises constantly. It's one of these places that are extremely difficult to objectify or quantify or analyze with any singular point of view. It's just too complicated. We're here tonight to celebrate the book that's just being released. How did that come about? The book? Yeah. Well, I had all these posters I've been doing. They're filling up all the space in my basement. I have 300,000 sheets of paper in the basement. I realized I had to do something with them. Actually, I had a friend, Steve Heller, who's a writer on the subject. And I said, Steve, help me get rid of this stuff. He said, well, you should have a catalog. I said, well, that's what I'll do. I'll make a catalog. You know anybody who'll publish it? And he recommended Abrams and my publisher. It was the easiest book I've ever done. I mean, I called Abrams. They asked to see the book. I said, dummy over electronically. They looked at it. They said, we'll do it. They did it. And I met my publisher for the first time tonight. Could you stand up, please? The ideal publisher. He made no trouble. At any rate, they said they would and they did. And all of you who are involved in publishing know there's nothing more difficult about trying to publish a book, because the first thing a publisher does is ask you to pay for it. This didn't happen that way. That's how it came about. When we were there in the studio, you had a dummy and you were telling us a little bit about the book. What struck me is you said there's a few in here that aren't good. And you were very straightforward. And you were like, yeah, sometimes I meant, which to me was shocking because such a legend, the idea that one in there would be that you didn't like. Can you, is that putting those out there and showing work that maybe isn't, is that kind of part of the process? Well, I think there was a choice in doing a book, which is, A, to do a select version of the book. So out of 500 posters, you pick the 30 that are really good. Or else you show what you've done. And I sort of avoided the issue by taking about 10% of the posters that are really lousy and putting them in the back under a heading saying that these are not so good. It seemed like a cheap way to achieve a reputation for being honest. So that's what I did. I mean, the book is obviously not a celebration of everything I've done, but an attempt to objectify and analyze why you do something to solve a specific problem. It's more of a kind of a book where you, for people who are not terribly visual, where you understand how you arrive at conclusions about going from where you are to where you want to be. So it really has a kind of different purpose than a display of virtuosity and genius. It really intends to show what you do when you make those things. When you graduated from Cooper Union, did you have any idea, or could you have ever foreseen this career that you've had? Or were you just kind of like, I just need to make a living? No, I could not have preconceptualized my life. It would have been very easy not to have this life. But I've been very lucky, and I've had great opportunities. And I have an accumulation of a lot of work. I'm worrying now what I'm going to do with it. Did you have a sense of what you wanted to do after school? Like, did you, obviously Pushpin came about pretty quickly after school. Was that a plan, or did that happen? I don't know. My mother made me believe that I could do anything I wanted, and that's the way it worked out. I was so certain that everything was attainable. But that, of course, was a moment in the history of the city and the country. I don't think the city feels that way anymore, because there are too many frustrating, complicated issues involved. And I certainly don't think the country feels that way anymore, because we have Trump in the presidency. But I felt that anything I could conceptualize, I could arrive at. And also, I enjoyed my work so much, there was nothing that I preferred more than drawing. And I would, I still do it, in fact. And if there's anything to do as an alternative, I'll consider it very carefully before I give up drawing or making things. I think making things, the ability to create something that only exists in reality after you actually conceptualize it in your mind, there is no more glorious purpose. And I just followed, in this case, my passion and my enthusiasm. And that's how it turned out. And also, I was very lucky. We spoke earlier about, obviously, the posters. How have you seen in your lifetime the poster and its cultural relevance in society kind of change? I don't know. That's too objective a problem for me. Doing posters are acts of persuasion. I mean, what you hope to do when you do a poster is change somebody's perception about an event or a subject. I don't like advertising. I don't like the idea of persuading people to do things that are not necessarily good for them. And so for me, if I can get closer to the idea of the lighting people or changing their perception, that's where the deepest satisfaction is. But to persuade somebody to do something that is, as I say, not necessarily good for them is something I'm always jumpy about. I'm sure you've been approached by huge advertising agencies to do stuff. Have you just avoided it or just done it begrudgingly? Yeah, I avoid most advertising. I could say the first 20 years of my experience, I did a lot of advertising. Didn't know any better. But now I really avoid it because either I don't know the consequences of what I do or I fear that by some mechanism, what I'm advocating at a time will turn negative in terms of the life of the people who are receiving those messages. So I'm very nervous about doing advertising. So you guys did do some at Pushpin? Or yeah. Yeah. Can you talk about that experience? In design history, we learn about Pushpin. We learn about your luxurious career. What was the environment like at Pushpin? Can you describe it to us? At Pushpin? Yeah. Oh, it's just a bunch of guys. The environment was that we felt we were working towards a common goal. And that was the achievement of beauty. We never in the 20 years that I was at Pushpin, we never once talked about money. Never once did we talk about how we would share the proceeds or pay the rent. It was because the sense of being together to accomplish a common goal was so fabulous. And that's a long time to sustain an effort of that kind. But if you are involved in making things of beauty, there's almost nothing that can replace it. When we talked, this is something that stuck out to me. The idea when you started Pushpin, design was one way. And you guys basically kind of changed and introduced this other way that design could be seen and experienced. Is that true? Well, define that a little more. I mean, you guys basically introduced the idea of really illustrative. It was kind of like pushing back against things where Helvetica and kind of Swiss. It was much more expressive. It was much more drawn. Well, what we were doing was a little different. One of the ideas that we held in common was that there was no correct way of doing anything graphically. That modernism was just a style. It was just like everything else. It was a choice you could make. It was no different than Art Nouveau or the Arts and Crafts movement. It was just a choice you had from infinite number of choices in human history about old. And I still feel that way. There's nothing visual in human history that I don't adore. So the idea of sticking to modernism, to sticking to one typeface, to sticking to geometry is the basis for a come on, grow up. And we also were interested in narration and storytelling. But storytelling was supposed to be a low level. That was illustration. It's a low level of activity. Abstraction, on the other hand, is up close to the gods. Because you're not dealing with stupid stories and fairy tales. You're dealing with abstractions, sublime truth, universal truth. Well, none of us believe that. I don't know why anybody else did. But the power of abstraction was still with us today. I mean, a good part of the field is working out of the same assumptions as people were working under the 30s and the 40s. But we were interested in something else. We were interested in telling stories and showing pictures. I mean, rob yourself of the ability to show people in a book. What are you talking about? Anyhow, we had contempt for that, if not contempt, at least little patients. And so we started in a different way. And people were so refreshed by the idea that you didn't have to be so highfalutin that you could take funny things and show them and decorative objects and Persian rugs and the richness of the visual world. And our work caught on. People got to like it. So I've had my company for 10-ish years with my business partner who directed the film. I can't imagine doing 10 more years, so 20 years total, and then just switching gears and going out on my own. Like, were you worried and nervous? Like, why did you want to just switch gears like that? I don't know why. I just get bored so easily. 20 years is a long time. I was also always very interested in storytelling. And I had been illustrating for so many years. Then I used to work a lot for Clay Felker, who was the editor of Esquire. And then the Sunday supplement for the Herald Tribune. I started working for it. We got to be good friends. Our wives got to be good friends. And we said, hey, why don't we do a magazine, like in the movies? And the Sunday supplement went out of business. And we were able to buy the name New York. And once that happened, we were in the magazine business. And it's a great business. It was a great business then. It's not such a good business now. But you're dealing with stories and telling things to people and changing perceptions. Wonderful. What did you know about the magazine? How did you get in the fight? I didn't know anything about the magazine business, except how to make a picture. But I have a literary sense. And I know how to tell stories. And also, I was sort of the opposite of Clay. I was a Jewish boy from the Bronx. He was from the Midwest, coming here as an outsider, pressing his nose against the glass panes of people, eating fancy dinners. And I just thought it was my town. And the two of us made a kind of composite of what the town was interested in. It was a great ride. What did you just, it was too much of a, I'm sure it was kind of a burnout schedule, right? The idea of the pace of a magazine was probably too much to handle at a certain point, right? Just keeping up with that schedule? I don't know. If you don't know that it's impossible, you can do it. Of course, I was still running the studio at the time. So I only used half my time for the magazine. And then we were in the same building. It's amazing how much you could do. If somebody doesn't tell you, you can't do it. What do you, I mean, New York Magazine is such an institution. You started, is that crazy when you walk down the street and you see that typography on every newsstand and you see the print publication and you think that me and another man, like we just started this thing? Is that, how does that make you feel? Just one of the things that happens in your life. You know what I mean? What was surprising was that it became successful because we really didn't know how to do it. And we were really learning on the job. The first year, if you ever go back and look at New York Magazine, the first year of our publication, it's horrible. It's full of terrible misunderstandings. But we finally got to understand who we were talking to and what we wanted to say and it straightened up and it became what it is. Incidentally, it has restored its sort of former place in the city. For a while it went inert after Murdoch bought it and it was a product that nobody really wanted here. And then after three or four years, it regained its footing and now I think it's a good magazine. Were you involved with editorial at the time of the magazine or were you primarily doing it? Oh yeah, there was no separation and everybody did everything. And then in that same building, then you pushed and did your career as Milton Glacier and kind of, how was your own design from different than Pushman? Then? Yeah. Then what? Then Pushman. Like how was the work that you were doing on your own as Milton Glacier and different than the work you were doing at Pushman? A large part of my role at the magazine was taken over by Walter Bernan, who's here tonight. And did, who did covers and layouts and heavy lifting. And I was actually of all things, I was designing supermarkets for a guy named Sir James Goldsmith who I met in England who wanted to buy a New York magazine but Murdoch beat him to it and he asked if I could design supermarkets so I started designing supermarkets. And I did that for eight, nine years. How do you design a super? Like what do you mean design a super? You figure out what the signs say, you figure out where people walk, you figure out what the stands look like. I mean, it's a great job designing a supermarket. But that took a lot of time. And you've done like playgrounds and wine bottles and like is it all the same thing to you? Or are you just kind of? All the same thing. To find out, is it a process? Is it just, it's just an idea, it's just figuring out how to communicate these things or? I don't know, ideas are cheap. They're just filling your head all the time. I think most of the time the problem is not, is how to begin. And once you begin, the path takes you to the destination. And if you believe that, everything's easy. Making something like New York Magazine or like, I love New York, these ideas are these transcendental ideas. You talk about that a little bit in the film. Do you know when you're making that that it is gonna transcend or it can be timeless or is it, it's all a crapshoot? I don't think so. Whose line was the fish in water, doesn't know what's in water? You're just working. And you don't, I mean if you really think things are hard to do, they are hard to do. And if you think they're not hard to do, they're not hard to do. And I have, everything, my life has been exceedingly easy. I made a lot of mistakes and did a lot of stupid things, but so what? I went on and found another way to do it. And I think so much of this is, this preconception of everything. The idea that you know the answers before you actually experience the event is a killer. I mean this sense of having no doubt. The great thing about being alive is to have doubt and to transcend them. But people without doubt who are certain of everything are really in terrible shape. You talk about mistakes and obviously those can be huge and can kind of push one way or the other. What are some big mistakes you, you're like, oh crap, I learned from this? Or is it involve client work or this? Everything, everything. I mean you just stumble, stumble along, you make mistakes. Mostly you make mistakes by working with the wrong people. Do you have a sense, which I've kind of developed over time when someone walks in the room and you can just, you get the vibe like, oh this is not gonna go up? Immediately. Yeah. I mean I think that's one of the great attributes of humankind, you go into a room and there were 10 people and you go, yes, yes, no, no, no, yes, yes. Before you say a word, we know it. I mean we all understand everything about everybody. But sometimes you don't want to pay attention. Was there a point where you got to pick and choose more so like, okay, I have this reputation, the work is out there, people know the work, I can be a little more selective or has that always kind of been a battle? Well what you want is to find people who trust you and who feel that you basically will find an answer for them and not that they have to direct you into what they want. One of the great difficulties for everybody who's in the design business is the fact that there are agendas where you don't feel you're doing anything except following the client's orders. And it does not yield, in most cases, a very happy result. Either in the work itself or in your relationship to the work. Have you had relationships with clients that have lasted 10, 20, 30, that have come? Yeah, I have a lot of relationship clients that last over the years, I do. And the best work I've done are for people I really like. I find, unfortunately, this is very unprofessional but I really find that I don't enjoy working for people and as a consequence, I don't do good work for them. So you think in that scenario it's just impossible to even, it's just they're not that great of a person, the work is just ultimately gonna not turn out the way. I don't want to be absolute about it. I'm sorry. You've done so much in your career and this is, again, a very tried question. I apologize. Is there anything left for you like I still want to do this one thing or I've never done this other thing or do you feel like you've done more than you'd ever want? I don't care what I do, in the sense of subject matter. People came to the office, they asked me to design eyeglasses. I thought it was a great problem. I never designed eyeglasses before. I did it. Didn't come out too well. No, there's no category that I would say is not interesting. Because your mom in the beginning said you could do anything or because you feel like design is so pervasive that that thinking process can be put on anything or it's just like you're willing to try it and who gives? I don't know. Not everyone has that. Sometimes people just do one thing and then they do it their whole career. It's certain. And some people like doing one thing and some people feel that they wanna do more than one thing. I mean, it's such an individual choice. I mean, some people really like the comfort of doing something and refining it every time and keep raising the level and they find they can do it within a category, you know, like shoes or watches or something like that and it satisfies them. But I've always been interested in novelty and seeing how far I could go. So with that line of thinking, the idea of freshness of novelty of new, you look at the I Heart New York logo, obviously it's extremely well rendered, all the details are there. Like when you lock in, can you really get in, dive in and kind of do those details or when you're drawing something, can you spend hours and hours and hours on it or do you kind of lose attention fast? Well, I didn't design the New York logo at the beginning. That was by Peter Palazzo who did a very good job and I just thinned it out. Probably wasn't the right thing to do with it. And I don't, you know, in an area of extreme skill, like rendering letter forms, I don't have the arrogance to say, I can do that, it's just a matter of paying attention. But there are too many complexities, too many details and too much preliminary work you have to do before you reach a point of mastery. But that isn't true about most things. You still have the drafting table in your studio. There were still 4,000 sharply sharpened pencils that were very, very beautiful. Is that when you're at your happiest when you're at the table? Well, now I work a lot with curiosity, something I never thought I'd do with a computer but I never touch a computer. These hands have never touched a computer. I work with somebody at my side and I tell them, move this, put someone else there. It's a very crude way of working but the results, you can't tell that somebody's skill didn't do it. Do you drive them crazy or are they? No, he's okay. You mentioned in Pushpin, the idea that no one ever cared about money, it wasn't like over the course of your career, have you developed more of a business sense or is that not something? No, I'm a terrible businessman. No, if I'm interested in something, I'll do it for nothing any time. And if I'm not interested in something, I can't do it. I mean, even if it's a big paying job, I mean, I realize at one point that if I were gonna be in business and treat what I do as a business, I would have to pay attention to money but that depressed me. Although I'm exceedingly rich through inadvertence but I could never figure out how to meet a payroll. Your brain just doesn't care about that, it's just not. I just can't seem to get to it. When you got out of Cooper versus now, has your drawing ability exponentially increased or was it always kind of the same level? I don't know. Also, I don't know what drawing ability is. I don't know what talent is. No, no, no, is it replicating what you see in front of you? I mean, there are certain kinds of skills, representational skills, but that's not what I think of. When you're drawing skillfully, you're drawing what's in your brain, not what's in front of you. And that distance between what's in front of you, what's in your brain is a distance that counts. Every drawing is an abstraction. So if you're in that business, the word ability means something else. When we were in your studio, you had work that you were preparing to do prints of and kind of in the more fine art category, but it seemed like there were more images you'd done in a design context that were being sold in the... Have you consciously stayed away from the art world and tried to be more in design or do you not care about that stuff? I have to go through this. That's what every class I've ever taught. There's no such thing as fine art, right? There's no such thing as commercial art. What there is are two ideas. One is moving towards an objective that produces an effect. And once you have the objective, you go into the process of trying to arrive at that objective. Art has nothing to do with that. Art is about transforming the mind of the viewer so that they perceive reality differently. Those two things have nothing to do with each other, although every once in a while, they sort of coexist. So I don't know how to tell someone that their drawing is inadequate. Outside of the fact that that space between seeing and representing has to have something that changes the people that witness it. If you see something that looks great like a piece of furniture, and it's terrific to sit in, it's not art even when it's very comfortable and it looks great because it hasn't done this other thing, which is to change your mind about the subject. You mentioned teaching earlier, and the idea of students. You've had a long relationship with SVA. What does teaching bring to you? Why have you maintained that throughout the course of your career? It makes you question what you believe. I mean, I hear myself saying something. I realize you've said that so many times, and yet you still don't know what it means. It is a way of discovering your own belief system, and then to be able to give it up. What satisfaction do you get from seeing students start to develop on their own and kind of see some of the things you're telling them and kind of start to flourish and you see that seedling in them that they might not even see? Is that part of it too, the idea of giving back? Well, you know, finally, at the end, you say, what did I do? What was my purpose? And if it's only making money or becoming famous, you have missed the point. Unless you share what you know with others, unless you develop a way of benefiting everyone, there's no point. So, teaching is one of the great experiences that you can have when you feel that you've shared your life. And if you're not sharing your life, what's the point? You have any one instance in teaching where you kind of had this moment of whether it was like a very curious moment or a very inspired moment or a memorable moment you have with a student? Well, I've been teaching for 60 years, so it's a little hard to isolate. 700,000 hours of teaching. No, I don't, except for the fact. You know when you've done something and people respond. I mean, I'm still getting letters from people who studied with me 50 years ago and I have to say it's enormously satisfying. Do you think or care about legacy at all? Or is that not concerning you? Whatever it is, I mean, I don't know how to objectify that legacy. I mean, I've done some things that have had an effect on people. And by and large, I don't think it's been a negative effect. If 100 years down the road somebody looked back and they were talking about your contribution to design, what would you want that contribution to be? I would have no idea, except to keep an open mind. Do you feel like that's been a constant throughout your careers keeping an open mind? Not throughout, but in the later years. Did it switch at a certain point where you just realized it was... I wouldn't know that. There's too much analysis going on here. That's my job, Milne. Does anybody in the audience have a question that they'd like to ask, Milton? I was just curious if you had another design person that you loved. I don't know what you think about Steve Jobs. I'm sorry. She's asking about what you think of Steve Jobs. Or someone else in the design world that you find iconic or that is inspiring to you? Steve Jobs? A remarkable accomplishment. I'm not particularly interested in him. Who are you interested in? I know this is, again, this idea of influence is tricky, but was there one person that was like, either when you were coming up at Cooper or throughout your career or a friend or a peer? I had really good mentorship. I had a Fulbright to Bologna early in my career. I studied with Giorgio Morandi, who's a great, great man, basically not for what he taught, but for what he was. He was a perfectly decent, committed guy who only cared about painting and teaching once a week. He just was a man of such profound integrity. I thought that mattered to him with teaching and painting. I thought that was a great model. So there's a great model for me. Thank you. You've lived in the city your entire life. What is the neighborhood or the building that for you encapsulates New York City? Like when you think of home in the city, is there a particular location? Yeah. Or at any point, I guess. I don't have that sort of geographic idea of, since I've been married, we've lived on the Lower East Side, the Upper West Side, and Chelsea. I don't think of any of them as being my home. They're just spaces in the city. I guess I have a kind of broad sense of what New York is, and it's not a singular place. It's really all over the block. If somebody took you and said, I wanted you to take me on your favorite parts of New York City a tour, are there like little things off the beaten path that are just... Yeah, well, there's a thousand of them, but I would say that the only generality I make is it tends to be downtown rather than uptown. Have there been any clients that you've been approached by that you ultimately have not gotten that you wish you had? Any clients that you've been approached by to pitch or they approached you and then the project fell through for whatever reason that you wished that the project had gone through? No. No, no, no, because something else turned up the next day. There's no... The velocity of events in your life can't be controlled. I suppose if I thought back, I could have done a great magazine for this person, but I don't think that way. Whatever... I just feel so lucky in my daily life that it doesn't occur to me that an alternative would be better. I've known you in my life. I'm glad to have known you in my life. You're a wonderful person, a great designer. I wanted to know were there any designers in your career that you liked, like their work, any influential designers besides that you looked up to or liked their work? Influential designers in your career. I always liked Paul Rand before I got to know him. No, no, I didn't mean that there were any. But when I was a kid, I liked Paul Rand. When I got to know him, I got to like him more and also admire his sensibility and his talent. That was true of Leo Leone who I got to know and a bunch of Italian designers, Italo Lupe and like that. It wasn't individuals so much as whole generation. In Italy, when I was there, it was a generation of Italian industrial designers and graphic designers who were superb. They still are. Pardon me for not knowing this, but did you spend a portion of your career in Italy working? Yeah, in my fulbright then, my wife and I went back to live in Italy five years later and then I had a whole bunch of Italian clients that are Olivetti of showing and Capari and so on. It was a wonderful period. Was there a difference? You saw working in the States versus working in Italy? Very different. And sensibility in everything is sort of collective. They don't have the sort of separation, but class separation between the rulers and the servants. I mean, if you go to do a job for them, they're partners with you, or at least they were at that time. And with my experience, it may not be universal, but that's what I got out of it. After spending time in Italy, why'd you want to come back to New York? Maybe, I don't know. Was your talent earned or were you gifted with it, Milton? Was my talent earned? Your talent. Was it gifted or earned? Well, I'm not quite sure what it meant, but earned, I know I work like hell. I mean, I spent every minute of my young life before I was in junior high school drawing and learning and reading, but there was nothing more important to me than the world of art. Now, I don't know what that means you earned anything. I mean, you could work that way and produce crap, and that's, unfortunately, you don't have the right neurological system, so... But do you feel like you had a natural talent more than most? I don't know what natural means. Everybody has latency, talent of some kind, but unless it comes into reality, it's irrelevant, right? I probably had a talent for tap dancing, but I never explored that. Like, when you were a young boy, when you were a young boy, what were your favorite things to do? Like, Leonardo da Vinci would walk around with paper in nature and he would just draw what he saw, but when you were young, what did you like? When you were a young boy, what did you like to do? What I like to do, outside of art? Or even in relation to art. I love to copy comics. I love to read about art. I always had a great literary interest in the history of art. There was nothing in terms of subjects, right? There was nothing more interesting to me, not even sex, when I was growing up. I mean, if I could be left alone with a sheet of paper and a piece of charcoal, I was happy as a clam. Did your parents have that creativity in them or was it a little different? I wouldn't call it creativity. I mean, they didn't have that interest or the opportunity. Did they encourage it, obviously, when they saw that you did? Well, as I told you, my mother said I could do anything, so when I started drawing, she would be enormously pleased and congratulate me. The world of design and illustration and art was very different back then. Did it seem like you were embarking on this path that wasn't fully laid out? I mean, the discipline of design... No, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what the world was doing. I just knew that I had great pleasure in doing it, but I had no idea what was going on in the world or who was doing what or what skills you needed. I learned on the job. Not even at Cooper? You didn't have a sense of what was happening beyond? By the time I was in Cooper, I was already professionally bound and I knew something about what designers did. But that was a long time. I went to life class to learn to draw when I was 12 years old, and that was with Moses Sawyer, who was part of a circle of sort of left-wing artists. But that's when I began officially my entry into the world of art. Thank you so much, Bill, and this has been fantastic. You're very welcome.