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Milton Glaser’s Grand User Experience
If your supermarket has a cheese section, a bakery, and fresh fish and herbs, thank Milton Glaser and his client, Sir James Goldsmith. The late designer’s legacy included a $500 million redesign of Grand Union. The total redesign of the supermarket experience did not last forever, but the innovations did.
For London-based financier Sir James Goldsmith (1933–1997), buying and selling companies on the world market — oil companies and industrial corporations — was all in a day’s work. In 1978, he bought the Grand Union Company, an American supermarket chain headquartered in Wayne, New Jersey. He then asked Milton Glaser, whose work in interiors, exhibitions, identity, posters, publications, and restaurant design was already world-famous, to “redefine the supermarket category.” Thus began an odyssey that took Goldsmith and Glaser to the food halls of London and Berlin and the open-air markets of Italy — and became one of the most remarkable stories in design history. “Our concept was to present food in a different, engaging way,” Glaser told me, “to break the up-and-down-the-aisles traffic pattern with piazza-like spaces, to take the customer on a voyage.” As each phase of the redesign program fell into place, fusty old Grand Union stores began sprouting a crisp new brand identity, charming store signage, new specialty departments, and nifty packages for everything from jam to cat food.
On June 26, Milton Glaser died at age 91. His work for Grand Union is an important part of his artistic, business, and personal legacy, perhaps as significant as his “I [Heart] NY” logo and Dylan poster. Personal because it brought together his interests in food, marketing, social issues, and town planning — and ultimately helped revolutionize the way supermarkets are designed. To find out how it all came about, I met with Glaser in his Murray Hill, New York, brownstone office. A slightly different version of the interview that follows was originally published in the September 1992 issue of Communication Arts magazine. At the time, the term “user experience” hadn’t been invented. But that’s exactly what Glaser succeeded in doing: to change the entire…
