“Dylan” poster
Milton Glaser’s iconic poster was commissioned by Columbia Records (art direction by Bob Cato) and included in each copy of the Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits album released in 1967.
While the silhouette in profile was inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s 1957 self-portrait, the colors and shapes were influenced by the Art Nouveau period. [Smithsonian] The letterforms are from Baby Teeth, designed by Glaser in 1964, taking his cue from a painted sign for a tailor in Mexico City.
I said if I have to use the word Dylan I’ll use this typeface largely because there wasn’t anything that looked quite like that around and I wanted to make the word itself look peculiar.
Read more about this iconic piece of 1960s American graphic design in “Designing Dylan”, an in-depth interview with Milton Glaser conducted by Martin Dupuis.
An authorized reproduction of the poster is available from Milton Glaser’s website.
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Glaser picked up the motif of the black silhouette profile for a poster designed for a concert by Dave Brubeck and Count Basie at the Lincoln Center Philharmonic Hall in 1969. From a feature in Graphis no. 168 (1973): “Glaser comments modestly: ‘My typography on this poster is rather clumsy, but the two B’s with the profiles of Brubeck and Basie have a certain vigour.’”