Milton Glaser has spent his career in search of "why something becomes understandable". Beginning in the 1950s, Glaser led the shift in graphic design away from the rational, orderly "Precisionist" style that prevailed between the wars, and toward a mode that was inspired, exuberant and filled with humanity. Over the course of his nearly-seventy-year career, Glaser has designed everything from the iconic "I ♥ NY" and logos for major cultural institutions, international brands, and health organizations, to exhibitions, public spaces and interiors, all with the expressed interest of fostering connectivity and community through the language of design.

In 2009, Glaser was the first graphic designer to receive the National Medal of Arts and was given the lifetime achievement award from the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in 2004. Glaser's insistent mantra of "art is work" is deeply felt in this collection, with its call to look with a slow, purposeful, meditative quality, at the richness and great feeling that his body of work contains.