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Milton Glaser’s unseen final logo could be his best ever

by Daniel Piper

The designer was working on a response to Covid-19.Milton Glaser, the celebrated graphic designer who died at age 91 in June 2020 and honorary member of UCDA, was working on a brand new project in his final weeks, according to the New York Times. The design was conceived as a response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“I’m actually developing something I haven’t shown to anyone,” Glaser told the New York Times in one of his last ever interviews. “It is simply a treatment of the word Together.’’ The design features letters of various fonts and sizes containing stripes of several colors, with each letter touching.

Jeremy Elias of the New York Times emailed Glaser in May to ask whether “some form of artistic expression,” similar to the designer’s famous I ♥ NY logo, could help to galvanise the ailing city during Covid-19. Instead of a mere email response, Elias was stunned to receive a FaceTime call from Glaser himself, in which the designer described his unfinished ‘Together’ project.

Glaser told Elias he had no idea if the new logo would become as iconic as I ♥ NY, but was committed to continuing working on the design, which he hoped to distribute to school students across the city of New York. He also explained why the logo makes no explicit reference to New York itself: “I want this identity to be adapted by others who are not New Yorkers. This is of course a world problem, not a New York problem.”

While we’ll never know what Glaser’s finished design would have looked like, the work-in-progress is already an uplifting and striking typographical design that we’d love to see take off like I ♥ NY.

From the I ♥ NY logo to his famous 1967 poster of Bob Dylan, Glaser’s iconic output has made him one of the most celebrated graphic designers in the United States. Since his death on June 26, 2020, Artists and designers across the world have paid tribute to Glaser and his profound impact on the world of graphic design.