Michael Bierut Quotes

I'm not sure about my design work every time.

When it comes to working on identities, a lot of the time I find myself working with a company that has been around for a while. No matter what they say their goal is, the history and the impression that they have already made in the minds of the public is a real thing that you have to deal with.

A lot of times, you design a logo to be timeless, but with something like the Olympics, timelessness is maybe not something you should be going for.

Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.

I actually don't think that brand new logos are worth that much or mean that much in and of themselves. So why not have a class of third graders compete to design your logo?

Part of maturing as a designer is discovering what you're good at.

It was 4 or 5 years into my first design job before the idea of doing graphic design on computers started taking hold. I started working in 1980, the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, then the real desktop publishing only started coming around in 85-86, but it wasn't really until the end of the decade that the transition became irresistible.

We get used to things, and we like reading the way we're used to reading.

People in the UK will say that the design community in the US is much more coherent than other countries. It has no government support at all, so it's really like a grass roots thing.

I actually think it almost works the other way sometimes: making a college textbook, say, look really "user friendly" tends to also make it look less "serious," even if nothing changes other than the design treatment.

Good typography, first, makes words readable. At its best, it does something more: it helps express the animating spirit of the ideas behind the words.

The studies I've seen about readability and legibility tend to focus on a specific set of metrics: size, not just the point size, but things like the size of the lower case letters as a proportion of the overall letter height, and line length. People simply can't read really small type set in really long lines.

I have a really shallow idea about what Australia is.

I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I'll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at the time, seemed so important. Meetings that I was really worried about, things that I was getting calls four times a day about, and I wonder, "Where did it all go? Where are they now?" It's so strange, everything has disappeared. The only thing that stays behind is the work.

The Nike swash that cost $30 and was designed by a Portland State University art student was probably worth that when she first showed it to them. At that point it had no equity at all. None of the guys commissioning it particularly liked it, they all wanted the Adidas three stripes and they thought that was a good logo.

I wanted to be a graphic designer from the time I was 15, without ever having actually met one. I lived in the mid-west, not in a media centre, and I didn't know anyone who did that for a living. It took me a while to find out what that thing I wanted to do was actually called, but once I sorted that out I got really interested in it.

I grew up in a Cleveland suburb called Parma, Ohio. Somewhere along the way I fell in love with a typeface called Bodoni. It turns out that Giambattista Bodoni had his foundry in Parma, Italy. So I pick Bodoni because us guys from Parma have to stick together.

If you look at the Olympic graphics for Mexico or Los Angeles, those programs don't look contemporary by today's eyes but they really look like they are of their place and time.

Most people have no idea how much goes into designing a typeface. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet, usually with two versions of each, upper and lower case. Punctuation and alternate characters and numbers - let's not forget numbers - can add another 40 or so.

Designs that have a whiff of complex impenetrability tends to suggest big, complicated ideas. Academic writing tends to work the same way, I understand.

If you can announce the Higgs Boson in Comic Sans, clearly anybody can do anything.

We use the word typography to describe two different things: the design of letterforms, and the layout of typeset passages on a page. Both of those experiences are really important to communicating information, especially when that information involves complex ideas.

I had a lot of enthusiasms that were very contradictory, I was never very doctrinaire in the type of design I wanted to do.

If typography is calling attention to itself, it's taking that attention away from what the words are saying.

Target for example, is just a dot with a circle around it, that's all it is, so if you want a logo like Target, you don't need to hire a designer, you barely need to know how to operate a computer program, the logo may as well be anything.

The scientists at CERN were actually surprised that people commented on this. Reportedly Fabiola Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs Boson, was asked why she had selected Comic Sans. She simply said, "Because I like it."

A lot of times, you design a logo to be timeless, but with something like the Olympics, timelessness is maybe not something you should be going for. Maybe you should be trying to come up with something that will really become associated with a moment in time, a few weeks, that happened, period. Then you look back, think about it and connect it with that time. It may look dated later but it will be still be evocative.

Most processes leave out the stuff no one wants to talk about: magic, intuition and leaps of faith.

If you do good work for good clients, it will lead to other good work for other good clients. If you do bad work for bad clients, it will lead to other bad work for other bad clients.

I have half a dozen designers who work for me, they 'realise' most of the design work, and I act as the design director and the main point of client contact on each project.

If you ask people in the US what logos they like and recognise, they'll name Target or Nike.

The truth about logos is that they are not that hard to do.

For instance, I assume those "carrots" we have on our keyboards were there originally to express "greater than" and "less than." Then they were adopted by coders, and now they show up all the time in the way email addresses are constructed. At least I think that's what happened.

I've heard some designers talk about the design process being centred on invention, starting with a blank slate. I admire that and occasionally I'm capable of that, but I have to admit that I really have trouble working with completely open briefs.

Everyone can have an opinion on a logo.

There was a time when most people had a choice between two kinds of personal communication, handwriting or using a typewriter. Today, people are invited to choose from a list of (surprisingly exotic) typefaces every time they turn on their computer. I think this has made everyone more aware of the idea that picking a typeface is a conscious choice.

The design of the notorious Palm Beach County "butterfly ballot" in the 2000 Presidential election is certainly one of them. But I would say most of the time this is less about a conscious attempt to manipulate an outcome, and more about pure ineptitude.

BE PURPOSEFUL AND THOUGHTFUL IN THE CHOICES YOU MAKE WHEN THE OPTIONS ARE NEARLY INFINITE.

A good cook can make something amazing out of even the blandest ingredients. Still, you don't want to eat the exact same dish every day.

In the US you have New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Miami and dozens of other cities; a few of them have a really strong visual character. But even with those there is just too much space between them and too many people.

Australia is one of the few places that I can think of where the cities, at least those I've been to, seem to have strikingly different characters and visual textures. To an American like me, there's basically Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane and the rest is all bush.

It's hard to predict what will happen as reading on screen becomes more of a universal norm, and when the formats dictated by social media - Twitter's 140-character limit, for instance - start to influence what we're used to.

The problem contains the solution.

Simplicity, wit, and good typography.

Australia has always put out some good design, particularly environmental graphics. I associate that with Australia, more so that a lot of other places. Whether that has anything to do with the landscape, who knows?

I'm always conscious of the context, the history, the specific environment of anything that I design and what it is going to be operating within.

I think that you could design a terrible logo for a good company with great people and they could build it into a great program. Alternatively you could design what seems to be a brilliant logo for people who are not smart or energetic or are incapable of associating with anything positive and it would become a terrible logo.

Not everything is design. But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything.