NOT long ago, I spotted this billboard outside the School of Visual Arts on East 23rd Street and 2nd Avenue, honoring Milton Glaser, perhaps the best known graphic designer of the past 60 years. During his lengthy career, he is best known for his iconic “I Heart New York” poster, for co-founding New York Magazine (and setting the template for its distinctive design scheme that persists till the present) and innumerable corporate logos and interior and environmental designs. His hallmark is directness and simplicity.
I have always been interested in graphic art, but never had the skill to truly pursue it. I do have a certificate from the Center For the Media Arts, where most importantly I learned page layout software that kept me in the black for two decades. No one seems to ever mention CMA, as it was called, and it’s been, er, um, forgotten for awhile since it closed in 1992 after a failed merger with Mercy College. It was located on West 26th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. We were granted a lot of lab time and I would head in on Saturdays and just absorb software like QuarkXPress (since supplanted by Adobe InDesign for page layouts) as well as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
I also took a Saturday morning class in Illustrator at SVA, but I was never a good freehand draw-er, either, and so never got the hang of it. I think I liked the idea of attending the heralded SVA rather than actually attending class there. I use Photoshop and have a monthly subscription, but I feel like I’m swatting a fly with a baseball bat; the software has more bang for the buck than I’ll ever use. Forgotten NY had been laid out in Adobe Pagemill, Adobe GoLive, and WordPress over the years.
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6/6/23
8 comments
Good read. I did some graphic design years ago. I was really bad at it.
I used to work at Val-Pak, and they trained me for DTP in-house. Like you, I learned early Quark, Illustrator (88) and Photoshop. The Adobe programs I learned mostly on my own or working with others since, at the time, nobody in-house knew enough to actually train us.
A monthly prescription? 😉
All right, all right. Subscription.
CMA was hard to find “on East 26th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues”! The smoke from Quebec must be getting to you, Kevin.
My daughter has a BFA from SVA and is very glad she went there. They taught her a lot of good stuff and she’s met many people.
I wish Manhattan/Bronx streets weren’t divided into East and West. It’s been a pain in the neck for me from the start. They should just start at 1 at the Hudson River.
When you do a description of a street location in Manhattan and include the avenues it’s between, isn’t the “E/W” part fairly superfluous? Including the “E/W” in the mailing address to avoid confusion, OK; but to tell someone that “It’s on Twenty-sixth between Seventh and Eighth” should be sufficient, I would have thought.
The School of Visual Arts recently made news when it dismissed a faculty member who behaved in an inappropriate manner:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12117103/Woke-NYC-college-professor-FIRED-hurling-foul-mouthed-abuse-students-pro-life-stand.html
Yes Glaser and PushPin Studios. Recalling Toy Lasker’s
Flashmaps NYC Guides from
1969/1972 and later, eventually taken over by Fodor. Some
pretty obvious Glaser influence on the cover design but credit
given to American Geographical Society.