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Milton Glaser, legendary designer and beloved Overlook author, was awarded the National Medal of Arts on February 25. The award was presented by President Obama in the East Room of The White House. Milton was the first designer to receive this honor. In addition to Milton, the recipients included Bob Dylan, Clint Eastwood, Maya Lin, Rita Moreno, Jessye Norman, Joseph P. Riley, Jr., Frank Stella, Michael Tilson Thomas, and John Williams.

To many, Milton Glaser is the embodiment of American graphic design during the latter half of this century. Born in 1929, Glaser was educated at the High School of Music and Art and the Cooper Union art school in New York and, via a Fulbright Scholarship, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy. He co-founded the revolutionary Pushpin Studios in 1954, founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968, established Milton Glaser, Inc. in 1974, and teamed with Walter Bernard in 1983 to form the publication design firm WBMG. Throughout his career, Glaser has been a prolific creator of posters and prints. His artwork has been featured in exhibits worldwide, including one-man shows at both the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of many museums. Glaser also is a renowned graphic and architectural designer with a body of work ranging from the iconic logo to complete graphic and decorative programs for the restaurants in the World Trade Center in New York. Among many awards throughout the years, he received the 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, for his profound and meaningful long-term contribution to the contemporary practice of design.

Watch and listen as the legendary Milton Glaser draws and talks about the act of drawing.

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Tags: Drawing, Milton Glaser, video

The life and work of Milton Glaser is the subject of a lengthy profile in Chronogram. Reporter Lynn Woods talked to the "graphic guru/design god" last month in New York. Milton's latest book is the highly provocative Drawing is Thinking, and the documentary "To Inform and Delight" is currently in theaters across the country. Make no mistake about it: We ♥ Milton Glaser!

Overlook author and graphic design legend Milton Glaser has launched a brand new website, MiltonGlaserWorks.com. An e-commerce-enabled companion to the designer's online home base, MiltonGlaser.com, the new site offers signed editions of Glaser's books and other works, including posters and a new range of giclée prints of assorted musicians and William Shakespeare. . . . Glaser fans should also be on the lookout for the release of the documentary Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight. Directed by Wendy Keys and featuring Overlook Publisher Peter Mayer in a supporting role, the film has been making the festival rounds and premieres on May 22 at New York's Cinema Village.

Milton Glaser's provocative new book Drawing is Thinking is reviewed by Creative Contact: "Twenty-five years after the publication of Milton Glaser: Graphic Design, the longest-selling design book in publishing history, Glaser took a stance with Art Is Work, a collection of his design work that shunned the conceptional and steered toward the process; brilliantly displayed in sequences showing the path a design takes from infancy to completion. In Drawing is Thinking, the follow up to Art is Work, the focus is, somewhat, back on the process, linking the physical act of drawing to the unconscious of the artist, akin to the act of automatic drawing the Surrealist artists practiced at their epoch. Glaser sees it, in the introduction stuffed into the beginning of this “meditation,” as an approach to “looking at the world without judgment and allowing what is in front of us to become understandable. Art, in fact, may be the best way we have to experience truth or what is real.” He seeks truth not only through drawing, but narrative as well. While most retrospective works focus on a chronological or stylistic time-line, Glaser would rather organize his work here rather randomly; letting narrative, or rather, multiple narratives, form and branch off in directions toward the unknown. And it works. In his apparent scrap-book method he denies giving us a narrative to follow, because he would be foolish to pretend he knew what said narrative was. Following his theory of meditation through assemblage of work, there is no reason why his narrative needs to be the same as ours. If art can be interpreted in any number of ways, why should the artist bother laying down the official set of blueprints for us to track when we can draft our own? Well, if the last sentence seems a tad bit naive, don’t be nervous. I don’t fully believe it myself. Much of conceptional art is built on this kind of foundation, and I agree that it can be helpful, even essential at times. And in a way, if Glaser did not let us know in the beginning that he wanted us to forge our own path through the terrain that followed, who’s to say we would have gone along and done it ourselves? He gives us a formula to follow, and it so happens to be that the formula is open ended. But these qualms, in hindsight, seem unnecessary: I found the path I followed a rather enjoyable one, unexpectedly. As a fan of Glaser’s design work, I was not ready for what seemed at first sight a glorified sketchbook, and what became, at the finish line, a deep exploration into the mind of one of our greatest artistic minds."

Milton Glaser's Drawing is Thinking is featured in "The Reading Room" column in the February issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. The full-page is illustrated with Glaser's pen and ink drawing from 2000, "Portrait Study." The images in Drawing is Thinking represent a sweeping range of subject matter taken from the full range of Milton Glaser's legendary career. They represent the author's commitment to the fundamental idea that drawing is not simply a way to represent reality, but, as the title suggests, a way to understand and experience the world.

Milton Glaser, author of Drawing is Thinking and Art is Work, at a recent event with writer Judith Thurman in New York City.

Milton Glaser, whose work has spanned more than 50 years, with an ouevre ranging from posters to architectural commissions to countless iconic images, will appear at three upcoming events next week in New York. Glaser's new book, Drawing is Thinking, has just been released by Overlook, along with a new paperback edition of the classic Art is Work.

Thursday, November 13, 7pm: Barnes & Noble, 2289 Broadway & 82nd Street, NYC. "A Conversation with Milton Glaser and Judith Thurman"

November 14, 6-8pm: Gallery 138, 138 W. 17th Street, Opening reception for one-man show of drawing and prints

November 20, 8:15pm: 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, "Dialogue with Design Legends Milton Glaser and Stephen Doyle."

Copies of Drawing is Thinking and Art is Work will be available at all events.