The Groove Issue 61 - How Connecting to the World Around You Produces Original Work
HOW CONNECTING to THE WORLD AROUND YOU PRODUCES ORIGINAL WORK
How many times have I heard from friends, strangers, and students that “they can’t come up with anything creative because everything has been already done”?
While I agree that “everything has been done,” I disagree with the fact that there’s no room for creativity or innovation with what exists.
The best work of an artist, designer, or entrepreneur emerges from the observation of phenomena that exists independently of each other. What these people do best is link those parts in a new, fresh, and compelling way.
How Milton Glaser Linked the World Around Him to Create Something New
Milton Glaser in his studio in 2018.
Everything that you have seen in your life has the potential to be integrated into your work.
Milton Glaser exemplified this better than anybody, and throughout his life, he was generous in his explanations and in citing the original sources of his inspiration.
Glaser was more than one of the world’s most celebrated designers. He was an artist and an entrepreneur who saw himself as a man “in the imagination business,” who relentlessly pursued creativity and originality by linking unrelated parts to create something new.
Nothing was ever off limits to him. He used whatever moved him or piqued his curiosity, past and present.
For example, he said that Piero della Francesca’s paintings inspired him in the use of absolute geometric clarity, as the Italian master did in the early Renaissance. Glaser took those ideas of order and precision and used them in his designs.
On the top left: Marcel Duchamp’s black and white silhouette self-portrait; on the bottom left The Prophet Muhammad encounters the angel of half-fire and half-snow, miniature from a copy of al-Sarai’s Nahj al-Faradis (c. 1465). On the right, the iconic 1966 Bob Dylan poster designed by Glaser.
In 1966, CBS Records commissioned Glaser to design a special poster to be packaged with Bob Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” album. Dylan had suffered an accident that threatened his career and they desperately needed to create a positive image around him.
Not only did Glaser design the poster, but it was inserted inside 6 million copies of Dylan’s vinyl album. It immediately became synonymous with the era of psychedelics and the new.
Glaser explained that the design came from the merging of memories he had of a Marcel Duchamp black and white silhouette self-portrait, while the rainbow hair came from shapes that intrigued him from Islamic painting.
Mixing all these seemingly unrelated things created something innovative at the time, which became a design reference in history with the passage of time.
One Thing Leads Into Another
On top, the picture that Milton Glaser took while roaming the streets in Mexico City in 1968, which served for inspiration to his “Baby Teeth” alphabet (under).
Glaser wasn’t circumscribed to one thing. He was good at graphic design, industrial design, typography, and illustration. Never missing an opportunity to connect invisible dots, he saw the world around him as a chance to experience evolution and growth.
For example, during a trip to Mexico in 1968, he passed by an ad for tailoring services in the middle of the street. For most people, this ad would have been totally irrelevant. But not for Glaser.
He took a picture of it, and once back in New York designed an alphabet he called “Baby Teeth” in many variations, which today has been copied and remixed thousands of times.
Originally designed as a Christmas card commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art in 1965, Robert Indiana’s LOVE, was the inspiration for Milton Glaser’s I ❤ NY logo.
But probably his most iconic design is the beloved I Love New York (stylized I ❤ NY) logo.
In the mid-1970s, New York City's crime rate was up and the city was widely perceived to be dangerous and on the verge of bankruptcy (as history repeats itself we are now experiencing a similar situation).
The State of New York hired advertising agency Wells Rich Greene and Glaser to design a logo to revitalize tourism.
In 1977, Glaser came up with the design scribbling on a piece of paper while sitting in the back of a taxicab on the way to a meeting with the clients.
He credited his inspiration for the logo to Robert Indiana's LOVE design (1965), with the four letters stacked on top of each other.
Glaser did the work pro bono, because he loved New York so much that he hoped it would become public property. And in a way, it did.
Magic Formulas Kill Creativity
In 1973, in the middle of his career, while being interviewed by his friend Peter Mayers, Glasser said: “I realized that anything I did long enough to master was no longer useful to me.”
Decades later, in June 2019 - exactly one year before his passing - he wrote in the foreword to the new edition of his classic illustrated book Milton Glaser Graphic Design that “the possibility of doing something that you’ve never done before still intrigues me… and I’m still working on a daily basis and nothing could please me more.”
Glaser avoided repeating himself, so when a company or a not-for-profit wanted to hire him, although the expectation was that he would replicate previous hits, he knew that whatever he was coming up with was going to be rooted in surprise.
Many times, his work got rejected and Glaser didn’t lament it. On the contrary, he took that as a signal that his designs were always in constant flux and never regurgitating the past.
As Glaser taught us, so long as you are having experiences and absorbing the world around you, you are processing and integrating that information in your very own and specific way. That’s exactly what creativity is.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
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THE CURATED GROOVE
A selection of interesting articles in business, art and creativity along with some other things worth mentioning:
How leaders can unlock creativity in others.
The Vatican library just opened its first permanent contemporary art gallery a stone’s throw from the Sistine Chapel.
Behind the cover design of a classic book.
With a single tweet, Lego explained the most important rule of creativity.
The Louvre said that ‘Salvator Mundi’ is a real Leonardo. Now the Prado says it’s not.
The key to innovation lies within you.
Best exhibition I saw in NYC last week