Milton Glaser’s poster for Olivetti,  1977, has a floating ball, surreal hand and empty, receding terrain that draws on the alienated metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico or Carlo Carrà.Credit...Milton Glaser.

Over seven decades, he produced an uncountable quantity of high-impact graphic imagery: first at Push Pin Studios, the countercultural and politically engaged design firm he established with Seymour Chwast and others; later at New York magazine, which he co-founded; and then as an independent designer whose experience never hardened into a signature style.

Glaser’s designs could be amusing, even outright comic, but his wit and invention were undergirded by a profound seriousness about the history of art and the power of design.

Milton Glaser relished the chance to design mass-market editions of the Bard’s plays, whose paperback covers (unlike hardcover at the time) could be printed in full process color.

Glaser co-founded with Clay Felker, brought the hot colors and thick lettering of Push Pin to the newsstand; the magazine still bears the abundantly serifed type setting he designed for issue No.

Glaser didn’t just design the cover; he also wrote the lead story (with Jerome Snyder), in which he praised the city’s best lox, bialys and halvah, and dissed sable as “the poor man’s sturgeon.”.

Glaser designed this lethally succinct poster — printed on cheap paper and circulated as widely as possible — in support of a five-year labor strike by Californian farm workers protesting their low pay and their exposure to carcinogenic pesticides.

Glaser’s more famous poster of Bob Dylan.

Glaser’s campaign has been obscured; this was a design that did not just tell tourists we were open for business, but convinced the citizens of a near-bankrupt metropolis to hold their heads high.

Glaser zeroed in on that part for his dramatic poster and playbill, in which a downcast angel has a parti-colored right wing, a direct quote from Albrecht Dürer’s precise, forensic “Wing of a Blue Roller.” (The crouched, nude seraph also seems to channel Hippolyte Flandrin’s “Nude Youth Sitting by the Sea,” a classic painting of gay desolation.) In Mr.

Glaser continued working long after the official retirement age, and one characteristic later work is this poster for the School of Visual Arts, where he became an instructor in 1960 and eventually served as chairman of the board.