MILTON GLASER

Glaser was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in New York. Glaser was educated at Manhattan's High School of Music and Art (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts), graduated from the Cooper Union in 1951 and later, via a Fulbright Scholarship, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna under Giorgio Morandi. He was greatly inspired by his sister's partner, who had studied typography in great depth.

In 1954 Glaser was a founder, and president, of Push Pin Studios formed with several of his Cooper Union classmates. Glaser's work is characterized by directness, simplicity and originality. He uses any medium or style to solve the problem at hand. His style ranges wildly from primitive to avant garde in his countless book jackets, album covers, advertisements and direct mail pieces and magazine illustrations. He started his own studio, Milton Glaser, Inc, in 1974. This led to his involvement with an increasingly wide diversity of projects, ranging from the design of New York Magazine, of which he was a co-founder, to a 600-foot mural for the Federal Office Building in Indianapolis.

Throughout his career he has had a major impact on contemporary illustration and design. His work has won numerous awards from Art Directors Clubs, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Society of Illustrators and the Type Directors Club. He is a member of Alliance Graphique International (AGI), and in 1979 he was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Glaser has taught at both the School of Visual Arts and at Cooper Union in New York City. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Glaser is the subject of the 2009 documentary film To Inform and Delight: The World of Milton Glaser