• Milton Glaser, the graphic designer perhaps best known for the "I ❤ NY" logo and the first graphic designer to be awarded the National Medal of Arts, has passed away. He was 91.
The New York Times writes in its obit that Glaser "was hired by the British tycoon James Goldsmith in 1978 to redesign the interiors, exteriors and packaging of the Grand Union chain of supermarkets, which Mr. Goldsmith had just acquired. Mr. Glaser designed several projects for the restaurateur Joe Baum, most memorably the Big Kitchen food court on the ground-floor concourse of the World Trade Center, the 1990s redesign of Windows on the World there and the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center."
Among other things, Glaser designed the logo and packaging for Brooklyn Brewery, and was a co-founder of New York magazine.
“I’ve always believed that the idea of beauty and the idea of aesthetics are very much linked to a social benefit. That the species couldn’t survive without art, because art is a kind of mediating device in human culture. People need it to survive,” he said in a 2003 interview with Metropolis Magazine.
