Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight Anecdotally Strolls Through Designer's Life

Comments (0) By Aaron Hillis Wednesday, May 20 2009

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Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight
Directed by Wendy Keys
Arthouse Films
Opens May 22, Cinema Village

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"I'm interested in work that doesn't exactly look as though it was designed, but sort of looks as though it happened," declares legendary graphic designer and New York magazine co-founder Milton Glaser. Sure enough, a tourist's-view stroll through midtown Manhattan might make one believe that his most ubiquitous work—the "I ♥ NY" logo, a registered trademark he, sadly, doesn't make a nickel from—simply materialized from out of manhole steam. Directed by retired Film Society of Lincoln Center producer/programmer Wendy Keys, To Inform and Delight (from a Horace quote that Glaser took to ♥T on the purpose of art) bridges Glaser's creative principles with the pop-cultural hype he's long produced. It's a pleasant, largely anecdotal portrait, as focused on his personal history (early influences, his Cooper Union education, revisiting the site of his former $135/month East Village floor-through) as it is on the iconography that will outlive him, from the rainbow-haired Dylan silhouette to the Brooklyn Brewery logo. Like many a newbie documentarian, Keys neglects artistry in favor of pragmatism, and it's unfortunate that her visually lifeless talking-head bits take no cues from her subject's clean aesthetic. But perhaps it's overly critical to fault anybody for not being Milton Glaser.