Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

silhouettes, Glaser was working with black-ink contour lines, creating flat
shapes and enriching them with adhesive color films, echoing the simple
iconography and directness of comic books. He was interested in Islamic
miniatures and was intrigued by the psychedelia emerging from the West
Coast. Long before postmodernism, Glaser understood that design is
essentially a vernacular language, and he delighted in discovering obscure
typographic forms. On a trip to Mexico City he was so captivated by the
letterforms on a small advertisement for a tailor that he photographed the
sign and returned home to invent the remainder of the alphabet, which
became the typeface Baby Teeth.
When the request came from Berg to design the poster of
Dylan along with a package of pictorial reference, including copies of the
Scherman photograph, it didn’t strike Glaser as anything extraordinary—
and time was short. So he did what he was already doing, rather effortlessly
and entirely intuitively.
First, the memory of a powerful icon surfaced, a self-portrait by
Marcel Duchamp—a profile torn from a single piece of colored paper and
placed on a black background. Dylan’s hair became an inductive mélange
of Persian-like forms. Dylan’s name, executed in Glaser’s own Baby Teeth
typeface, rested in the bottom right corner of the poster, a warm brown
against a black background, unusual in its subtlety. The geometric
letterforms contrasted sharply with the mellifluous hair and sinuous
profile. Glaser admitted to being consciously intrigued by the notion of
opposites: the hard, reductive edge of Dylan’s profile contrasts with the
expressive nature of the hair; bright, whimsical color reverberates off the
dense, solid black.
In the original sketch (his only sketch), Glaser positioned a
harmonica in front of Dylan’s mouth, as in Scherman’s photograph. When
Berg saw the sketch, Glaser recalled, he said “Simplify, simplify.” What he
meant was, “Get rid of the harmonica.” Eliminating the harmonica created
a white negative space nearly equal to the black silhouetted profile. This
increased the visual vibration of the whole piece and focused more
attention on the “coastline” of Dylan’s profile. Glaser went directly to finish.
Six million Dylan posters were printed and included in the album, making
it the single most reproduced image Glaser ever created, aside from his
I ♥NY™campaign.