Gallery
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A 1987 photo of Milton Glaser in his studio.
A 1970 movie poster by Milton Glaser.
Milton Glaser's typeface "Baby Teeth."
Book Jacket design by Seymour Chwast in 1968.
| Industry | Graphic design, Illustration, Communications, Advertising, Marketing |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1954 |
| Founder | Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast |
| Headquarters | New York City |
Key people | Milton Glaser Seymour Chwast Reynold Ruffins Edward Sorel |
| Products | album covers, book covers, posters, packaging, advertisements, and corporate and environmental logos and graphics |
| Website | www |
Push Pin Studios is a graphic design and illustration studio founded by the influential graphic designers Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in New York City in 1954. The firm's work, and distinctive illustration style, featuring "bulgy" three-dimensional "interpretations of historical styles (Victorian, art nouveau, art deco),"made their mark by departing from what the firm refers to as the "numbing rigidity of modernism, and the rote sentimental realism of commercial illustration." [1] Eye magazine contextualized the results in a 1995 article for their "Reputations" column:
In an era dominated by Swiss rationalism, the Push Pin style celebrated the eclectic and eccentric design of the passé past while it introduced a distinctly contemporary design vocabulary, with a wide range of work that included record sleeves, books, posters, corporate logotypes, font design and magazine formats. [2]
After graduating from Cooper Union, Sorel and Chwast worked for a short time at Esquire magazine, both being fired on the same day. Joining forces to form an art studio, they called it "Push Pin" after a mailing piece, The Push Pin Almanack, which they self-published during their time at Esquire. Sorel and Chwast used their unemployment checks to rent a cold-water flat on East 17th Street in Manhattan. A few months later, Glaser returned from a Fulbright Fellowship year in Italy and joined the studio. [3]
Sorel left Push Pin in 1956, the same day the studio moved into a much nicer space on East 57th Street. [3] For twenty years Glaser and Chwast directed Push Pin, along with graphic designers and illustrators such as John Alcorn (in the late 1950s), Paul Davis (1959–1963), Barry Zaid (1969–1975), Paul Degen (1970s) among others. [4] Today, Chwast is principal of The Pushpin Group, Inc. [5]
Over the last six decades, the firm's work, and that of the founding designers, along with Reynold Ruffins, Edward Sorel and several other designers who have been associated with it, has led to several books, as well as publication in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Print (magazine) and traveling exhibitions, such as "The Push Pin Style," which traveled to the Museum of Decorative Arts of the Louvre, [6] as well as numerous cities in Europe, Brazil, and Japan in 1970–72.
The firm's in-house publications included The Push Pin Almanack and The Push Pin Graphic. [5] Out of house, the founding team served as art directors of Audience magazine, a high-end, subscription-only bimonthly arts and literature periodical, for whom Glaser and Chwast "used photographs, drawings, big pictures and lavish colors to accompany articles by Donald Barthelme, Herbert Gold, Martin Mayer, Thomas Whiteside and Frank Capra, among others." [7] Founded in 1971, under Glaser and Chwast's direction, it won the top award of the Society of Publication Designers in 1972. In 1973, however, it folded due to lack of funding. [7] [8] [9]
(Selection was limited by availability.)
The School of Visual Arts New York City is a private for-profit art school in New York City. It was founded in 1947 and is a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design.
Milton Glaser was an American graphic designer. His designs include the I Love New York logo, a 1966 poster for Bob Dylan, and the logos for DC Comics, Stony Brook University, and Brooklyn Brewery.
Barry Zaid is a graphic artist and designer.
Seymour Chwast is an American graphic designer, illustrator, and type designer.
Edward Sorel is an American illustrator, caricaturist, cartoonist, graphic designer and author. His work is known for its storytelling, its left-liberal social commentary, its criticism of reactionary right-wing politics and organized religion. Formerly a regular contributor to The Nation, New York Magazine and The Atlantic, his work is today seen more frequently in Vanity Fair. He has been hailed by The New York Times as "one of America's foremost political satirists". As a lifelong New Yorker, a large portion of his work interprets the life, culture and political events of New York City. There is also a large body of work which is nostalgic for the stars of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood when Sorel was a youth. Sorel is noted for his wavy pen-and-ink style, which he describes as "spontaneous direct drawing".
James McMullan is an Irish-Canadian illustrator and designer of theatrical posters.
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Paula Scher is an American graphic designer, painter and art educator in design. She also served as the first female principal at Pentagram, which she joined in 1991.
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John Alcorn was an American commercial artist and designer, and an illustrator of children's books. In addition to his accomplishments in the areas of packaging, corporate and dimensional design, Alcorn designed the opening titles for several Federico Fellini films. During his career, Alcorn created numerous book jackets and paperback covers, and his work appeared in many major exhibits.
Paul Degen was a Swiss illustrator, caricaturist, painter and sculptor. He is mostly known for the cartoons he did for The New York Times and his 34 title illustrations for The New Yorker magazine in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1992 he was awarded the Basel Innovation Prize for inventing the "ROMA birth wheel."
Mirko Ilić is a Bosnian-born comics artist and graphic designer based in New York City.
R. O. Blechman is an American animator, illustrator, children's-book author, graphic novelist and editorial cartoonist whose work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and other institutions. He was inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame in 1999.
Audience: A Quarterly Review of Literature and the Arts, also sometimes known as Audience, was founded in Cambridge, MA in 1955. In its early incarnation, the magazine cultivated, disseminated and built a lasting historical record of early mid-century work from notable figures in arts and letters, many of whom would go on to acclaim, including poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, George Starbuck and Piero Heliczer; artists Joyce Reopel and Arthur Polonsky; writer Roger Shattuck and writer-comedian Zero Mostel.
Paul Brooks Davis is an American graphic artist.
Reynold Dash Ruffins was an American painter, illustrator, and graphic designer. With Milton Glaser, Edward Sorel, and Seymour Chwast, Ruffins founded Push Pin Studios in 1954. An illustrator of more than twenty children's books, Ruffins is known for his "stylistic versatility, vibrant colors, and penchant for fanciful creatures." He has had many solo exhibitions and been part of group show exhibitions at Paris' Musée du Louvre, and in Milan, Bologna, and Tokyo.
Gail Anderson is an American graphic designer, writer, and educator- known for her typographic skill, hand-lettering and poster design.
Christian Piper was a German artist.
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