Summer 2020
Michael Bierut: The designer’s designer
‘Online, everything arrives with equal weight … everything can have a logo, everything can have an identity, everyone can do it in an untutored way.’
Pentagram partner Michael Bierut (see ‘Reputations’ in Eye 24) studied graphic design in Cincinnatti and worked for Vignelli Associates for ten years before joining Pentagram in 1990. His client list includes Walt Disney, The New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue, The Robin Hood Foundation, MIT Media Lab, Mastercard, Princeton University, the New York Jets, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Yahoo and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. His awards include the AIGA medal (2006) and he is a teacher at Yale School of Art. Bierut co-founded Design Observer, which he still runs with Jessica Helfand. His publications include the monograph How to (2016) and 79 Short Essays on Design (2007).
Eye Is graphic design still a good term for what you do at Pentagram?
Michael Bierut The term graphic design still works for me. I still have a very clear idea of what graphic design is, the way it covers a whole field. On social media I follow people who think of themselves as graphic designers, and there are robust conversations between them and the people who call themselves digital designers or product designers.
Technology has blurred all those borders. In the 1970s, there were people who thought it was more about moving things around in white space than communication but graphic design always covered everything.
Has your approach to design changed much in the time you have been working?
Maybe reassuringly, maybe pathetically, I believe that my mind is still working the same way. You can get set in certain grooves, but on a human level, as one gets good at something (is this ‘finding your voice’?), you keep doing it. In the 1970s, I experienced design as these relatively stable things – record sleeves, book covers, posters, identity systems.
Poster for OMNY, the NY Metropolitan Transit Authority’s tap-and-go system. Bierut says: ‘We named it OMNY (One Metro New York) and commissioned Christian Schwartz to do a custom version of his Neue Haas Grotesk, a nod to the Helvetica typeface associated with Vignelli and Noorda’s signage system.’
Top. Portrait by Maria Spann.
If I were coming into the field now, I’d be looking at things online all the time – it’s inherently unstable. Online, everything arrives with equal weight … everything can have a logo, everything can have an identity, everyone can do it in an untutored way.
How do you go about finding new team members, and collaborators, such as type designers, etc.?
I’m more inclined to hire people who are different to me, to having some tension. You want people with facility, with craft. I’m attuned to people who are readers, who are engaged with the world, who can talk. There are people who enjoy the visceral pleasure of pushing stuff around on the screen. That hermetic obsessiveness can produce great results.
Take the example of Vaughan Oliver (see Eye 76). What he did was incredibly hermetic, just solving the same problem over and over again, but that produced an extraordinary body of work. Look at the great outpouring of emotion that attended his untimely death.
Have your core ideas and approaches changed?
There
are certain clients I gravitate towards … The world has changed,
but what really hasn’t changed is people. Whether I am doing a tiny
project for a family friend or a big corporate job, if I show them
what I have done, their reactions come into play in the same way. Are
they likely to be suspicious or a ‘reluctant purchaser’? With a
big company, you’re going to work your way up from base camp until
you reach the one person who will make the decision. That person is
going to ‘look in the mirror’ as if they are trying on a shirt or
a hat, to see whether the design is right for them. That part of it
is the same.
Have design students changed?
As
a teacher, I’ve often found interesting articles about design for
my students, and I’ll be rubbing my hands in anticipation at how
fascinating (even life-changing) they might find that article. And
when they come back in and I say ‘what do you think?’ they shrug,
or they say they found it too hard. Some people are happy just to
find stuff that looks cool. I’m a ‘reading makes you smart’
person. The idea that you can become smart in any other way beats me.
What’s happening now is that there’s a chorus of more diverse voices. Take that interview with the late aerosol writer Phase 2 by Jerome Harris (see ‘As, Not For’, pp.70-71). Phase 2 had a huge body of emblematic work … that would otherwise be unattributed. What a treasure it is to have this interview and this material.
Is this ‘chorus of voices’ changing design?
In my advanced age I’ve become much more self conscious about both the privileges I’ve enjoyed, and the barriers that people who aren’t straight white men face in our field and the world in general. I tend to turn down most speaking engagements these days, and direct them to a list I’ve been compiling.
I’ve also had a chance to put together some juries and symposium panels with really interesting, diverse speakers. This is as much for me as anyone else: I am really interested in finding out who’s out there, and it’s getting harder and harder, but more and more fun.
Is it getting ‘harder and harder’ because some of the people out there no longer feel the need to talk to 2000 design enthusiasts at a conference?
I think there are just so many designers, so many definitions of ‘design’, so many design subcultures with their own design ‘heroes’ and so many designers who are influential, inspiring and important but who would reject the title of ‘hero’ altogether — well, it just makes it hard to keep track. Is this a bad thing? Quite the opposite. What’s more boring than a hall of fame that’s carved in stone and locked behind glass?
In Steven Heller’s Reputations interview with you in Eye 24 you say: ‘I love graphic design. I’ve been a glutton for this sort of stuff. So being the guy who always showed up for every single event, eventually you get to run the slide projector at the AIGA.’ Are you still that guy?
Of course. And if you need someone to run a slide projector, or fix a jammed one, I’m definitely your guy.
John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London
First published in Eye no. 100 vol. 25, 2020
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