Iconic Graphic Designer Glaser on Art, 

Money, Education, and the Kindness of 

the Universe 

“If you perceive the universe as being a universe of 

abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as 

one of scarcity, then it will be.”

 

 Milton Glaser— legendary mastermind of the famous 

I♥NY logo, author of  dlightful and little-known vintage 

children's books, notorious notebook-doodler, 

modern-day sage of art and purpose— is celebrated by 

many as the greatest graphic designer alive. From How 

to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer— the same 

fantastic anthology of conversations with creative icons 

 

that gave us Paula Scher's slot machine metaphor for 

creativity and Massimo Vignelli on intellectual elegance, 

education, and love— comes a fascinating and 

remarkably heartening conversation that reveals the 

inner workings of this beautiful mind and beautiful spirit.

What E. B. White has done for writing — "A writer has 

the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not 

dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift 

people up, not lower them down," he  memorably a

sserted — Glaser has done for the visual arts, a legacy  

Debbie Millman captures beautifully in the introduction 

to the interview:

While other great designers have created cool

posters, beautiful book covers, and powerful

logos, Milton Glaser has actually lifted this age he

inhabits. Because of his integrity and his vision,

he has enabled us all to walk on higher ground,

 and it is that for which we should be especially grateful.

In fact, this ethos is reflected in Glaser’s timeless 

addition to history's finest definitions of art:

Work that goes beyond its functional intention

 and moves us in deep and mysterious ways we call 

great work.

Glaser shares the wonderful and sweetly allegorical 

story of how he became an artist:

The story of how I decided to become an artist is

this: When I was a very little boy, a cousin of mine

came to my house with a paper bag. He asked me

if I wanted to see a bird. I thought he had a bird in

the bag. He stuck his hand in the bag, and I

realized that he had drawn a bird on the side of a

bag with a pencil. I was astonished! I perceived

this as being miraculous. At that moment, I

decided that was what I was going to do with my

life. Create miracles.

His early childhood, in fact, was a petri dish for his 

genesis as an artist. He recounts another memory that 

presaged his gift for welcoming not-knowing in order to 

know life more richly as the muse of his mastery, a skill 

that would become the guiding principle of his creative 

ethos:

I was eight years old, and I had rheumatic fever. I

was at home and in bed for a year. In a certain

sense, the only thing that kept me alive was this:

Every day, my mother would bring me a wooden

board and a pound of modeling clay, and I would

create a little universe out of houses, tanks,

warriors. At the end of the day, I would pound

them into oblivion and look forward to the next

day when I could recreate the world.

I think that, to some degree, this is part of my

character as a designer: To keep moving and not

get stuck in my own past. This is what I try very

hard to do.

I think at that moment in my life, I found a peculiar

path: To continually discard a lot of the things

that I knew how to do in favor of finding out what I

didn’t. I think this is the way you stay alive

professionally.

In the context of discussing those early memories, 

however, Glaser offers an important disclaimer about 

the limitations of our memory and its imperfections:

Memory is treacherous; you can’t depend on it. It

is basically always recreated to reinforce your

anxiety or to make yourself look better, but

whatever actually did happen is totally

susceptible to subjective interpretation. I

absolutely don’t trust my memory.

Glaser seconds Alan Watt's timeless wisdom on profit 

vs. purpose and  gets to the heart of how to find your 

purpose so you can  worry less about money:

I never had the model of financial success as

being the reason to work. When I was at Push Pin,

none of the partners made enough money to live

on. It took ten years for us to make as much as a

junior art director in an agency. We were making

$65 a week! But money has never been a

motivating force in my work. I am very happy to

have made enough money to live as well as I do,

but I never thought of money as a reason to work.

For me, work was about survival. I had to work in

order to have any sense of being human. If I

wasn’t working or making something, I was very

nervous and unstable.

Echoing Frank Lloyd Wright’s aphorism that "an expert 

is a man who has stopped thinking because 'he 

knows.'" 

Glaser rejoices in the glory of keeping the internal fire of 

learning ever-ablaze:

That is a great feeling: when you feel the

possibility of learning. It’s a terrible feeling to feel

you can’t learn or have reached the end of your

potential.

Touching on Sister Corita Kent's 10 rules for learning 

and  Bertrand  Russell's commandments for teachers,  

Glaser — a revered educator himself — goes on to offer 

an articulate vision for what the art of education really 

means:

What you teach is what you are. You don’t teach

by telling people things.

I believe that you convey your ideas by the

authenticity of your being. Not by glibly telling

someone what to do or how to do it. I believe that

this is why so much teaching is ineffective. …

Good teaching is merely having an encounter

with someone who has an idea of what life is that

you admire and want to emulate.

Echoing Rilke’s counsel to live the questions,  Richard 

Feynman’s advocacy of allowing for doubt,  John 

Keats’s insistence on the power of  "negative 

capability", and  Anaïs Nin’s faith in the richness of 

living with ambiguity,  Glaser reflects on the immutable 

impermanence of  everything, the very thing he once 

intuited in his childhood experience of sculpting and 

destroying his modeling clay creations:

There is no security in the world, or in life. I don’t

mind living with some ambiguity and realizing

that eventually, everything changes.

But the most powerful aspect of Glaser’s ethos, one all 

the more necessary as a lifeboat amidst today’s flood of 

cynicism, is his unrelenting optimism - an essential 

antidote to the zero-sum-game mentality of success that 

plagues so much of our modern thinking:

If you perceive the universe as being a universe

of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the

universe as one of scarcity, then it will be. And I

never thought of the universe as one of scarcity. I

always thought that there was enough of

everything to go around — that there are enough

ideas in the universe and enough nourishment.

In extending this conviction to the most tender 

aspiration of the human heart, our longing to belong, he 

echoes Ted Hughe's poignant reflection on our inner 

child and adds to literary history's most beautiful 

definitions of love: 

Do you perceive you live your life through love or

fear? They are very different manifestations. My

favorite quote is by the English novelist Iris Murdoch. She said, “Love is the very difficult

understanding that something other than yourself

is real.” I like the idea that all that love is, is

acknowledging another’s reality.

Acknowledging that the world exists, and that you

are not the only participant in it, is a profound

step. The impulse towards narcissism or

self-interest is so profound, particularly when you

have a worry of injury or fear. It’s very hard to

move beyond the idea that there is not enough to

go around, to move beyond that sense of “I better

get mine before anybody else takes it away from

me.”