Five weeks ago, I received a call from Milton Glaser. We’d never met, but he was kindly answering an email I’d sent his studio a few hours prior. At best, I expected a response from his assistant. Instead, I got a FaceTime Audio call from the 90-year-old graphic designer. The result was a conversation that ranged from the confounding nature of his success to the motivation for his latest project. It would be one of his last interviews before his death on Friday, his 91st birthday.

Only a few weeks before our conversation, New York had hit its Covid-19 apex. The infection and death rates were slowing, but the city’s future remained in question. My prompt to Mr. Glaser, and the impetus for my initial email, was simple: In this moment of despair, could some form of artistic expression — similar to his 1977 “I ♥ NY” logo, scratched out in the back of a taxicab — help galvanize an ailing city?

Mr. Glaser was already grappling with some version of the same question. In between dialysis, he had been working on a project he hoped to distribute to public school students across the city, and ultimately the country. It was a graphical treatment of the word “Together.”

“There was no business plan,” said Ignacio Serrano, Mr. Glaser’s graphic designer and studio manager. “It was about connecting people through art. He would use the example of, ‘If you like Mozart and I like Mozart, we already have something in common. We have a bridge.’”

Mr. Glaser’s health was already in decline when the Black Lives Matter protests spread throughout the city, and then the world. “If he had more time,” said Mr. Serrano, “I’m sure he would have come to the office with some ideas.”

Here are excerpts from my conversation with Mr. Glaser. They have been edited and condensed for clarity.