On this episode, Michael Bierut discusses how he was lucky to have found design as a kid growing up in Ohio, how a successful career requires being really engaged in “the game,” and how designers of the future need to make more room for curiosity.

Photo by Yuansi Li

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Jp:

Michael Bierut. Thank you so much for being on. This is Design School with us today.

Michael:

Thank you very much.

Jp:

It’s amazing to sit across the way from someone that I actually mimic in my class. I often show the Helvetica documentary.

Michael:

Uh-huh, yeah.

Jp:

And my favorite is your, “Stop, Coke, stop.” And, I often do that to students projects so… [laughter]

Michael:

Little did I know that-that would become my version of, “I’m having what she’s having…”

All:

[laughter]

Jp:

I thought maybe what we could do is start off by talking a bit about your design education. I know a bit of your background and how you discovered design at an early age. But, maybe if you’d love to share a story of how you got to be Michael Bierut.

Michael:

I was always Michael Bierut. But, I got to be a graphic designer, in what in its time was an unusual way. I’m… I’m old. I was born in 1957, so I grew up in the ’60s and was in high school in the ’70s—and this is pre-internet, pre-… a lot of things. And, among other things, it was pre… It Was pre-common knowledge that there was such a thing called graphic design. I think there was some vague idea there was something called art, and there was some version of art called commercial art.

I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, and didn’t know anyone who was doing any kind of art, commercial, fine or otherwise. And, no one I knew, knew anyone who was doing anything like that. Yet, I was good at art, I liked to draw. I was good at doing realistic drawing, which was impressive to people. It’s not the only kind of art that counts, for sure. And, I think it actually is overrated in terms of, uh, you know, it’s all about craft and not that much about creativity.

But, I was good at it, and it so happened that as I got increasingly interested in art at both junior high school and high school level, I also started getting recruited to doing things like posters for the play, and banners for the football team, and t-shirts for the band and things like that. And boy, did I love doing that! It was much better than just doing a single drawing or painting and have that hanging up in the hallway outside of the art rooms. You know, to sort of have something that was mass-produced. To see people wearing a t-shirt; something you had designed. Or, to walk down the hall and see the reproduction of a poster you had done for the play over and over again—I just thought that was thrilling but I had no idea by what mechanism that could be a career.

I happened to find this uh funny lonesome little book in our high school library called Your Future in Graphic Design/Art and it was by a guy whose name was unfamiliar to me named, Neil Fujita, and it turns out that he actually was a fairly well known New York art director who did among other things the cover of the book The Godfather which became the, the movie…

Jp:

Oh sure. Yeah, yeah.

Michael:

Yeah, with the hand-holding, you know…

And, so he did that. Although, I think most people wouldn’t know his name. This book was electrifying to me because it was filled with examples of people who were doing this thing that I thought had no name, that I thought was just this weird hobby that I might have while I’d have to go get a real job.

And so, I became immediately interested in graphic design with that name associated to it—the name graphic design and started… I sort of undertook a little independent study course in graphic design in high school, where I volunteered to design any printed thing that anyone wanted done.

Then, I went to the bigger library and found this book, uh also on… called Graphic Design, except it was by Armin Hofmann. Now some of the listeners here may know that Armin Hofmann, for years, ran the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland; very different than Neil Fujita, uh working as a New York art director. And, that book, you know, that I took that book out from the library, who has more graphic design. So, I asked my mom to buy me this book Graphic Design and so she bought me a book and the book she bought me was, Graphic Design by Milton Glaser, so another kind of graphic design.

All:

[laughter]

Michael:

So, before I even entered college I had these three books as my kind of three lodestars in a way. And, I ended up going to the University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Architecture, and Art. Now it’s called the College of Design Architecture, Art, and Planning. And, they had an intensive course of study, a major in Graphic Design. And, I’d asked my high school guidance counselor, I want to study graphic design. I want to do it at a university because I thought, you know, it just would seem less specialized in an art school and exposure to more things. I was smart enough to do that. And so, I stumbled into the course of study in Cincinnati that was very much along the Armin Hofmann Basel Swiss line. I sort of had the Neil Fujita and Milton Glaser beaten out of me. I had all my bad habits beaten out of me actually doing these very simple exercises. You know, moving dots around in squares and hand drawing type. And now, I look back and I can’t figure out how I like knew anything without the internet, without…

Jp:

Mm-hmm.

Michael:

Email, without… You know, it just was strange to make your way in the world, kind of half blind, really, you know? And, particularly if you’re a visual person hungry for visual things. If I want to go see a painting, go downtown to the Art Museum.

Jp:

Mm-hmm.

Michael:

If I wanna take out a book, you know, have someone figure out a way to get to the library and look at the card catalog in these wooden drawers, pieces of cardboard… It’s all very strange.

Jp:

Yeah. [chuckle]

Michael:

But, it’s miraculously satisfying in a way and it started me on a journey that has ended up with me sitting here with you guys. So…

Jp:

Nice. I’m curious about how from that moment in high school to then graduating that you then moved into art and design and graphic design in New York. What was that like for you being kind of… seeing it in the books and then now being the one in the books?

Michael:

Uh, well, it took me a long time to sort of… There was…

Jp:

Oh yeah, sure. [laughter]

Michael:

It took so long I don’t remember it actually being a stunning revelation to actually kind of encounter that moment. But, I will say that I graduated from college way back in 1980. That was a moment in time where, still if you wanted to, if you were serious about doing graphic design or advertise or anything about communications and media, you pretty much had to go to some place like New York, maybe Chicago, maybe L.A., maybe San Francisco, possibly Seattle. Cleveland’s not… Cleveland’s 500 miles from New York. I had visited there on a high school field trip. I really liked it. And, this was New York in the ’70s when it was not easy to like. It was like crime ridden, filthy and dangerous. But, I still liked it anyway. It seemed exciting to me.

I had a one… You know, all of these things are very lucky. The fact that that book by Fujita was in my high school library in Parma, Ohio. The fact that at the Snow Road Regional Library in Parma, was this Armin Hofmann book. I can’t even imagine why someone would order that book for that library.

Jp:

Right.

Michael:

And then, my dear mother trying to make me happy on Christmas. You know, goes out and buys the wrong book, and I ended up with that Milton Glaser book.

So, one last bit of luck, or one additional bit of luck (I’ve had many). On one of my visits to New York that I made, I had a friend of a friend, a guy I had interned with, one of his college classmates had gotten a job working for a designer named Massimo Vignelli. And again, I couldn’t tell you how I even knew the name Massimo Vignelli. You couldn’t look him up on the Internet, there was like no blogs, or anything like that. So, I must have seen it in a design book somewhere. But, he was a legendary New York figure who had designed, among other things, the signage for the New York subway system and the logo for Bloomingdales, and all kinds of other stuff.

Jp:

Yeah… Everything. Everything important at that time.

Michael:

Yeah, well, things that really appealed massively to me. And, especially I remember emblematic was the, uh, he had designed a very design-y geometric map of the New York subway system which was introduced in the early ’70s and abandoned by the end of the decade because it was abstract and geometric and a lot of people, as it turns out, don’t like abstract, geometric things. they prefer geographically accurate things.

So, to some people’s great dismay, including mine, it was abandoned. But, I remember when I did one of my trips to New York, I picked up that at, you know, it was the map they gave you for free in the subway. And, I had it pinned to my wall in Ohio for years. It was sort of this kind of a Holy Relic of, “One day this will all be mine.”

And, believe it or not, I went to go visit this friend of a friend who had this job at Vignelli Associates, you know, and really just, I was just there as a gawker, you know, as a peeping Tom in a way I didn’t… I wasn’t, you know, I had my portfolio with me because I sort of thought, you know, something might come of it. And, it so happened that, umm, I got to meet Mr. Vignelli himself, and he liked my portfolio and sort of in this impetuous, enthusiastic way that was his manner kind of said, “You know, when you graduate come here and you can have a job.” And now it turns out that, you know, he had a lot of people working for him, that would go back in and sort of, uh, clarify his remarks.

Jp:

Sure. Yeah. [laughter]

Michael:

And it turned out that that wasn’t a signable contract. That was his general intention. That if everything worked out, if there was a position, if I was available, if, if, if… Maybe I could get a job there.

Jp:

Mm-hmm.

Michael:

So, I was quite excited about that. But, also a bit realistic too. But, as it turned out, more luck, you know. One of their designers moved on to another job that spring and they held the position open for me for a month or two and I started there. It was my first job out of school. I was the lowest of the low design assistants there. And in 1980, you could really be a… What design assistants did was really low. It was like almost borderline janitorial. You know, no computers, no precise work. I mean, it was like mixing paste in pots and cutting things and taping things.

Jp:

Yeah.

Michael:

It was more like, uh, working in the, you know, as a short order assistant to a short order cook in a greasy spoon diner than it was anything glamorous. But, I was so happy to have that job.

Chad:

Mm-hmm. Earlier you mentioned when you were talking about having the skill of drawing…

Michael:

Yeah.

Chad:

…You mentioned the difference between creativity and craft.

Michael:

Yeah, yeah.

Chad:

I’m curious of that. A) What you mean by that?

Michael:

I’ll tell you, yeah. [chuckle]

Chad:

But also, B) How that comes into play and kind of as you entered into your career in those, in those earlier positions.

Michael:

Yeah I, you know, Chad, thanks for asking that. It’s an interesting question. Design is this elusive thing that can be a little bit difficult to define. I think it’s, uh, it’s certainly, kind of, somewhere between craft and creativity.

Chad:

Mm-hmm.

Michael:

You have… I know some people that are obsessed with craft and, and then other people are better at the creative part of it and kinda can’t execute all that well, but you have to be able to do both. Or, at least figure out a way to manage both of those things.

And at the same time, there’s another dichotomy that I think is the balance you strike between your own personal need for self-expression, which also could be defined as creativity. And, if you’re working as a designer in a commercial setting or in any setting where you have clients or other people that you’re collaborating with or people commissioning work from you that’s meant to serve some goal that they have, you have to figure out some way to put your creativity in the service of whatever their goal is.

You know, if you were just… You know, I imagine that fine artists just go off in a room, and their creativity serves no one but themselves. I’m told by, by the way, actual fine artists that that is not the case. But, that’s my fantasy about what it’s like to be an artist.

As it turns out, I don’t really have that impulse to go off and create things all by myself. I really do thrive on connecting with people and I think, you know, that, that was something that was there in high school. I think part of the thrill of being good at… When someone said, “Hey you’re good at art. Can you do the, the banner for the football homecoming game?” They would never ask me to be the starting quarterback. They wouldn’t even put me on the bench as the substitute to a substitute. I was so nerdy and, and clumsy. You know, I stood no chance of that. But, you got to sort of participate in that world just by having a banner up in the hallway. And likewise, I didn’t have that nerve to go on stage and perform, but to do the poster for the play, you’re kind of participating in that world too.

And so, think about it, it’s still the same thing, as a graphic designer and you’re not in the hermetic world of art where you’re in your own room trying to work through things just in your own head for your own satisfaction. But instead, you’re constantly being asked to engage with other problems, other contexts and most importantly, other people.

Chad:

Does that metaphor of playing a game and sitting on the sideline and being the, the second string…

Michael:

Yeah. Yeah. [chuckle]

Chad:

…to the second string, is that kind of what it felt like when you started at Vignelli? [chuckle]

Michael:

Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You know, I was like, “Put me in, put me in coach… [chuckle]

And then in fact, I think what I learned, and it’s funny to watch young designers working for me discover the same things. It’s like, you know, the first day in your job, you’re just like trying not to get fired, or not to make anyone mad. And, someone asks you to do something and if they ask you to go from A to B, you sort of say, “B, B, A, B, A, B, A, B… Okay, I can do this. I can do this.” You know?

Chad:

Mm-hmm.

Michael:

And, like if they go ask you to go to C, you sort of have to write it all down and rehearse it and maybe burst into tears along the way. That’s how I was, at least.

What happens is, after I was there for a few months, you know, I started sort of being able to anticipate where things were going. Someone could say go from A to B, and then I would make an educated guess and figure that the destination was C, or D or E, F, G or wherever it was, right?

And you think, “Well, I’ve got that down. Let me just push it one more step and see how far I can go.” You know, before long, I’d be able to take on whole projects by myself, work with clients on my own, sort of work under Massimo Vignelli’s guidance, uh, in a general sense. But also, once something was up and running, it was sort of a load off his mind if I could just sort of like do it for him, right?

Chad:

Mm-hmm.

Michael:

And then, in a place like that, you don’t really, you know… I wasn’t able to get that position by being unique and creative ’cause no one who was knocking on that door was hoping to have a 20-something kid from Ohio put his signature on the work. That was the last thing they wanted. They wanted a, you know, a legendary Italian American designer named Massimo Vignelli to, uh, to be the designer who was authoring their project, right?

Jp:

Mm-hmm.

Michael:

So, a lot of what I did had to do with trying to figure out every day, every minute, what would Massimo do? And then follow suit. But then I think, umm, I just, I swear I see it happening today with my designers. They are simultaneously trying to understand what I want. But, I like to think I encourage them to do this, but even without the encouragement the best of them will also say, “Well, okay boss, here’s the thing, you were asking for, but then I noticed you could also do it backwards and upside down, and it looks like this.” And, I guess I could say, “You’re fired. I didn’t authorize you to do it backwards and upside down.” But instead I’m like, “Huh.” And sometimes I’m like, “Nice try, but that doesn’t work.” But hey, a lot of times I’m like, “Wait a second, I think you got something there.”

A lot of what it takes is going from being the second string to the second string, and it’s not so much you get called into the big game and you throw a touchdown pass. And here, here I am with these sports metaphors. I’m so inept.

All:

[laughter]

Michael:

I wouldn’t know if I was throwing a touchdown pass. And you’d… It’s not. That’s not what you have to do.

What you have to do is just be really engaged in the game, be really, you know, be attentive to the skills you see on display. Work hard, practice yourself, and eventually, you sort of find yourself. Like all of a sudden you’re on stage and you’re the one doing it, you know? And, it doesn’t happen overnight, usually. And, you can’t make it happen entirely through this impatient force of will. You sort of have to just keep pressing and pressing and eventually you get there. And, you have to be conscious of what your own skill level is, too. I mean, to the best people, their taste is always a little bit better than their skill and they have to kind of keep trying to close that gap and chasing that difference.

Jp:

What I usually will tell students is that curiosity is just as important as the creation.

Michael:

Oh absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah, ’cause I think there aren’t… I mean from, at least from me, I’ll speak for myself, there’s just, there’s not enough graphic… Graphic design in and of itself isn’t sufficiently interesting. They’re just kind of like finding new typeface and lining something up in a new way or not. It’s just, alone that isn’t quite enough to keep you doing it. I mean, I’ve been doing this now for nearly four decades.

Instead, what’s interesting is, someone comes to you with a new kind of problem and it requires a new kind of solution, and it sort of forces you out of your normal kind of modus operandi, and you’re forced to invent something. You will respond in a new way. Or, in my case, one of my younger designers is, I’m working with them, and, uh, I say, one of my younger designers, they’re the only kind of designers I have.

Jp:

[chuckle]

Michael:

But, designers working with me will sort of, like, come up with an idea that cross-pollinates with something I’m talking about and something original emerges from that. And, it all has to do with just being able to manage what, as you say, that curiosity.

Jp:

Mm-hmm. I would like to go back a step or two, what you were saying about your interview with Massimo and just serendipitously having your portfolio.

Michael:

Yeah.

Jp:

These days, what would the 20-some-year-old Ohio student, who happens to come to Pentagram or to a design studio, how do they get found similarly?

Michael:

Hmm. Yeah, I think that, it seemed hard to me to get a job back then. But, there weren’t armies of people from Ohio coming to that office looking for jobs. I was, I mean like you had to, literally get there physically, kind of carry a physical portfolio, somehow walk physically through the door, you know?

Jp:

Oh yeah, I remember that.

Michael:

And so, it wasn’t sending PDFs, or sending a link to your beautiful website. None of that was possible, right? So, it was, it was physically harder. Yet, I don’t remember thinking, “Those suckers, I’ve got it made. I’m the one who’s going that extra mile, and I’m gonna make this happen.”

Jp:

[laughter]

Michael:

So, I think that really, what the reason I got that job was, again, there was some luck involved, maybe mostly luck.

But, the part that wasn’t luck was a combination of several things. One was that, it wasn’t just a name on my list. I knew what Vignelli Associates was. I knew who Massimo Vignelli was, right? And it’s, I mean it’s not so much that I kind of re-did my whole portfolio to kind of play to what I imagine would be his taste, but I went there as opposed to 10 other places I might have gone. Because I sort of, I could look at… What interested me about graphic design was on display there. And so, first of all, I get a lot of people who will write me or send me emails or whatever. And, I’ll look at their portfolio and sometimes it’s really good but they would not be happy working for me.

If the kind of work they wanna do is in their portfolio, I’m not the person they should work for. I have partners that might be better for them, but it’s not me. And, and so… And it’s not like I get mad at them and think, “You know, what’s wrong with you, stupid? Why did you send me this stuff?” I mean… Everyone is kind of going through the same journey, in a way.

Jp:

Sure, yeah. Mmhmm.

Michael:

So, I’m not holding it against them.

But, I think the connection happens when sort of, uh, your enthusiasms align a little bit with those of your desired place of employment. So, that’s one thing.

Being good at what you do, is another thing. And, I worked hard. I was good at what I did. So, that helps as well.

Nowadays, what’ll catch my attention as much as anything else is if someone writes me a cover letter. I mean, I’ve actually given people interviews just because I thought they had a beautifully written note; not necessarily really long, not filled with big AP English words necessarily, but just something that was graceful where I really felt I got some insight into their personality from it. And so, you really wanna feel that there’s a person there, a person that you’d like to spend time with.

You’d like to feel that they’re acknowledging the fact that they’re fulfilling a need that I have in my office, that I’m not simply… You know, I think the hardest thing in the world to do is get yourself out of your own point of view and sort of think, “Okay, I’m sending an email to a person who probably is getting five of these a day. Who may or may not have a job. You know, how do I… How do I frame it that way?”

Instead of you’re just thinking, “I got… You know, I gotta send out 10 of these every hour or else nothing’s gonna happen.” And, you’re just firing away and you’re not really trying to really think about, “Why am I doing this? And what’s in it for them?”

So, I think that those are the things that work for me today.

And, I will say, however, that at Pentagram I’ve got, umm, seven partners in the New York office alone and 20-plus partners around the world. I would say that every one of them would give you a slightly different answer to that question. So my point of view is as good as… It works for me. It may not work for anyone else.

Jp:

Sure, yeah.

Chad:

We’ve covered your past a little bit, but I also wanted to talk about the future and where you think the future of design is headed. And a question of, is design education keeping up based off of what you’re seeing? And then, what do you think is needed for the future of design? And it’s a…

Michael:

That’s a big question. Well done.

Chad:

Yeah.

Michael:

You know, I don’t think that every… I don’t think every school has to, uh, educate every student to be ready to take on that challenge.

And, I don’t think maybe no school needs to educate a single student to take on that challenge, it’s just too big.

You know, one of the things I’ve just observed over my career is that, you know, the… The kinds of skills you need to succeed, the kinds of, you could say, if you wanna call them craft skills let’s say, which today, I would describe as a software program or, you know, fluency in one particular, specific kind of media application. Those are like the… That’s the cost of entry to participate, but those will, you know, those will inevitably change.

Jp:

Mm-hmm.

Michael:

You know, they’ve already changed over and over again over the course of my career. I think there are probably… Again, I, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve never asked someone like, “Tell me about your software experience.” I just assume that it’s kind of there if they have competent looking work, if they have good-looking… If they have work that looks good and interesting in their portfolio, I assume that they, if they made it, they know how to make stuff like that, right?

Jp:

Mm-hmm.

Michael:

And so, I think, umm… What I sort of look for… Umm, this is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. But, you know, I’m someone who kind of really values curiosity, kind of a broad, generalist sort of base of knowledge that’s brought to bear on design problems, enthusiasm, you know, energy. And, I think those things sort will never go out of style. And I think, in a way there’s even more pressure than ever to exhibit those traits…

Chad:

Mm-hmm.

Michael:

Because no one in my, on my team and very, you know… No designers that I see working in our office are expected to, to be nothing more than someone sitting at a computer doing some rote task, no matter how well they do it, no matter how well they kern type or no matter how well they retouch images in Photoshop or or whatever they’re doing. That sort of isn’t what anyone is doing, you know.

I think instead, I look at my team, and I look at the other designers who are working for my partners and I see people, you know, who are able to bring real kind of intelligence and curiosity to the work that they’re doing. You can give them a little something to do. And boy, you know, every once in a while, you know, well, it happens enough that it’s like, uh, that it’s the joy of my life, is that I’ll be working on a project with a designer on my team, and we’ll sort of arrange to talk about it the morning after next or something, and I’ll sit down with them and they’ll say, “I’ve got… Let me, let me show you, I’ve been working on something.” And they’ll just show me something and I just can’t believe that they’ve done it.

Chad:

Hmm.

Michael:

It’s like, they will have kind of worked out a whole original type face just based on a couple of sketches that we’d been doing two days before. Or, they took something and they animated it just to see what it would look like. Or, they just, you know, they did some research and turned up some things that I had no idea were out there. And so, I think the future of design and the future of design education has to somehow make room to prepare people to enter a world which is gonna reward that sort of energy and curiosity.

Chad:

Mm-hmm.

Michael:

That’s what I think. It sort of is hard to do because I was…

Boy was I dumb, you know, when I was in high school. I had never, barely been out of Ohio. I had read a lot of books and things, but I just sat cowering in the back of the Vignelli office listening to them talking Italian. Half of the references they made, half the names they dropped, the places they mentioned, I had no idea what they were talking about.

And, I just would soak it all in and then… And then somehow just got interested in it all on my own, you know? And, I took pleasure in what I learned, right? It’s not like just furrowing your brow and getting all sweaty and cramming for a test. If that’s what it feels like, you shouldn’t be doing it.

Instead, they would be talking about a chance to work with, uh, people I later learned were famous architect but just, just seemed like people to me, and then suddenly kind of getting to experience their work or listen to the conversations was just enthralling to me. It was genuinely interesting and inspiring. And, I think unless you’re kind of finding places for that sort of inspiration in the work that you’re surrounding yourself with, you are just gonna be… Your only other recourse is to go back and kern things, you know…

And that’s important, you know…

Jp:

Mm-hmm.

Michael:

…if you’re doing a kind of project that requires good kerning. And, not everyone cares about that these days, but…

That’s sort of… Those kind of decisions can make or break a project as well, but I think the real engine, the fuel that actually gets you to the destination has to do with curiosity and energy.

Chad:

Yeah. It’s such like the central point of your answer ’cause I feel like the more I’ve talked to people about that question of the future of design, the more I think about, you know, coming out of school in my own career was this idea of like, “How do I stay relevant through it?”

Michael:

Yeah, yeah.

Jp:

Now I even remember… So Jp was my, uh, design professor in undergrad. I remember at that time, everybody would get really frustrated ’cause he wouldn’t really teach us software.

Michael:

Yeah.

Jp:

He was teaching us how to think.

Michael:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jp:

And, we didn’t get it at the time. But, I think it’s interesting that things you talk about that are design education needs to make more room for are these things that will carry you through your career.

Michael:

Yeah. Yeah.

Chad:

Yeah.

Michael:

Even the history of Pentagram, the firm that I work in now, when it was founded in ’72, when I was way back doing my first high school play poster honestly, it was a multi-disciplinary design firm. And, there were three disciplines. There was graphic design, industrial design and architecture.

And that, those were basically pretty much described the whole world of commercial design consultancies. And today, you know, there are so many other ways to define design… You know, every… Experience design, obviously digital design, but sound design, service design. There are so many different ways you can describe it. And the kinds of, uh, challenges that, that all these different disciplines represent have very little to do with tools and techniques. It has to do with your ability to be genuinely curious about a problem really broadly defined, and have a sense of curiosity about the people that the solution of that problem may affect.

That’s, uh, a lot harder to teach than a software program, and is actually harder to learn than a software program. But, I think that those are the things that I learned along the way that’s, uh, you know, to the degree that I have any relevance at all, 40 years later, it’s because of those factors rather than the ability I had back in the day to, uh, cut something really precisely with an X-Acto knife (that I probably could do right now if I had to. And, no one cares.) [laughter]

Chad:

Well, and those skills still got you to where you were.

Michael:

Yeah, yeah.

Chad:

You, you know, it was… It was the barrier to entry.

Michael:

Yep. Yeah.

Jp:

I would also say that, you know, looking back at your work and a bit of what you were just talking about right now, it seems that one of the important things about design for you is access.

Michael:

Mm-hmm.

Jp:

You know, that the subway map, it was accessible, it was free.

Michael:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jp:

It was something that the public was able to gain access to. You enjoyed the posters because…

Michael:

Yes, yeah.

Jp:

…it was available to the public. And, I think that design, especially now, is about accessibility. You know, information has become so important and so integral to our community that accessing that information in ways that visually tell that story about whatever the data is saying.

Michael:

Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. And I think that, umm… It goes to this idea that I think graphic design, particularly, is a very social act.

Jp:

Yeah.

Michael:

You know, it really… It doesn’t usually have that much meaning if it’s being done for private purposes, if you’re communicating with yourself or with a limited number of people, although some graphic design is intended to do just that. And not everything has to be mass, mass, mass communication.

But I think if… The thing that really is interesting to me, and people say, you know, “What moments have really… What kinds of projects have you done that you really were excited by or, uh, particularly proud of?” And when that question’s asked, when I picture things, it’s seldom the sketch in my sketch book or the way it looked on the computer screen or the first presentation. But, it’s the first time I saw a shopping bag being carried by someone who I didn’t know who had just bought something at the store and all of a sudden it was like the shopping bag I designed was just being carried by someone who I’d never met, who didn’t know my name, who probably wouldn’t be… Who may not even understand that another human being had to do anything at all to make that shopping bag look the way it looked, you know?

Jp:

[chuckle]

Michael:

But still, it was like really exciting. And, I think that the idea that as graphic designers, particularly the decisions we make and the skill that we can exhibit, you know, the ideas that we have, can actually contribute to people’s experience in the world, making the world a better place, or changing minds somehow, or just providing really small moments of joy. You know, that’s really a great thing. And it’s something that I don’t think any other design profession delivers in quite the same way.

Jp:

So, we’re trying something a little bit new this season, which is a session we call the “recommendation list.”

Michael:

Yup.

Jp:

So I’m gonna ask you a couple of little questions and see what you get out of that.

Michael:

And, I was not prepared for this. So, forgive me if my recommendations are, uh, flawed.

Jp:

[laughter] No, that’s okay, they’re, they are easy ones.

Michael:

Okay.

Jp:

So, what would you consider the most important tool for a designer right now? And tool can be however you want to describe it.

Michael:

It’s a little bit of a cop out, but I would say, uh, for most designers I know it’s their eyes. And, just by that I mean being alert, using your eyes to read, using your eyes to discover, using your eyes to see things. You, you know, eating… Like one of my partners did a book called “Eating With Your Eyes” and it sort of is using your eyes as nourishment. Now, I know that there are partially sighted designers. I know that blind architects who can actually make a real contribution. So, I don’t mean to privilege one sense over another. And maybe, more generally speaking, I just mean using your senses to kinda perceive the world, and translating that into things that actually can bring meaning to that world.

Jp:

It’s almost, uh, going back to what you had said earlier, which is, “Be curious.” Use your eyes to be curious about things.

Michael:

Yeah. Exactly.

Jp:

Any, uh, suggestions on a piece of music that you’ve recently discovered?

Michael:

Well, I didn’t recently discover this, but my wife asked me to recommend a recording of this song called “The Goldberg Variations” that people have heard me, like I… Everyone knows that I’m like really into Bach…

Jp:

Sure.

Michael:

…and The Goldberg Variations, I’m like really obsessed by.

And, I went off on that. I’ve been married for 38 years, and I went off on a rant about Bach and The Goldberg Variations and I realized as I was doing it, that it really is a very design-y sort of piece of music, in that he did it on commission. He was being, uh, Goldberg was the guy, I think who hired him to do it. And, he was a guy who supposedly had insomnia and just wanted something, kind of wanted a piano piece to play when he couldn’t go to sleep. So it’s not, it’s not exactly a lullaby but it’s just kind of, it’s not inherently like a dramatic piece of music, it’s just basically this one simple song. And then Bach does, uh, 32 variations of it.

And, what’s interesting is that each of the variations retains the basic chord structure and the basic, uh, overall melodic structure of the song, but one is fast. One is slow. One is happy. One is sad. One’s dramatic. One’s spritely. And, it really reminds, I mean, so much of what you do as a designer is taking things that are understood and not thought about that much. And like the alphabet is something like that. And then, figuring out ways to do unique customizations of that common thing in a way that makes it distinctive, but still makes it recognizable.

So that’s, your… There’s, there’s a theme and we do variations on that theme, I think as graphic designers, a lot.

And so, I recommend… There’s a famous Canadian piano player named Glenn Gould who recorded it twice. And, the first recording he made actually made his reputation because it was considered like a technical exercise. It didn’t really have much uh, promise as a performance piece, and he just played the hell out of that song.

Jp:

Nice.

Michael:

It made his reputation, like, overnight. And then, he re-recorded it much later in his life. And you can get, you can download both the recordings, the ’55 recording (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwas_7H5KUs), and I think the ’70, you know, ’82 recording (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEkXet4WX_c), much later, much older.

And the difference between those two is actually really interesting too. As I’ve gotten older, I sort of sympathized with the difference between when he was showing off as a young guy in 1955 and kind of confronting his own mortality much later.

Jp:

Yeah, yeah.

Michael:

It’s like a very profound piece of music, I recommended it to everyone. Even, even if you don’t like classical music, that, that’s like, it’s a hell of a piece of piano playin’.

Jp:

Awesome, thank you. I’m on sabbatical right now and so, I am thirsty for any good articles to read about design. Is there anything that you’ve read recently that maybe hasn’t gotten a lot of play? Or, that you feel is going to be an important part of the design community in the future, or even now?

Michael:

Oh, that’s interesting. There’s actually an article that I think is about a year old now, but I read and I found myself quoting it quite a bit, and it was funny ’cause it didn’t… I thought I knew about the subject matter before and it turned out that it just sort of crystallized it in a way that made it new to me. It was in The Atlantic and I think the title, somewhat sensationalistic, was something like, ‘Four Letter Formula That Will Make Anyone Buy Anything.’ [“The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything” by Derek Thompson for The Atlantic] And so it’s, it’s, like a hype-y sort of click-bait-y sort of title…

Jp:

Yeah. [chuckle]

Michael:

It’s something like that. And basically, it’s talking about the industrial designer, industrial and graphic designer Raymond Loewy, who in the mid-20th century…

Jp:

Oh yeah, yeah.

Michael:

You know, he designed everything from, I think he was on the livery for, umm, Air Force One. He designed the old logo for the U.S. Post Office. Designed the fam… The Lucky Strike package if anyone smokes Lucky Strikes anymore… Umm, you know, did all… You know, designed cars and trains.

Jp:

Yeah, I was gonna say, the Avanti is where I know the name from.

Michael:

Yeah, the Avanti. He designed the 20th century limited train. All, you know… He was amazing, mid-century designer whose career spanned, uh, decades and decades.

And, he had this very specific philosophy that was called M.A.Y.A. I’m not even sure whether it’s pronounced my-uh or whether it’s just, you say the letters… But, it stands for ‘Most Advanced Yet Acceptable’. And, it’s based on this premise that all of us are interested in two things. The balance is different for all of us. We’re interested in, umm, things in kind of the comfort of familiarity, things that are predictable. Just a reliability in a way. But we’re also interested in novelty, excitement and surprise.

And, if you only have the first thing, you live a boring life and it’s depressing. If you only have the second thing, it’s like it’s too jarring and you can never get any rest, right? And so, his design work always kind of mediated between those two ends, and I think that’s true for all design work. In a way it goes back to what I was saying before, if you think about Glenn Gould, the theme is the expected thing and the novelty are the variations, right? It sort of applies to sports, you know. It’s like the, the rules of the game are the same for every single baseball game yet every single baseball game is slightly different because of just the happenstance that happens and the most memorable ones are ones where amazingly surprising things happen, right?

If there were no rules at all it would, it would just be a bunch of meaningless activity that wouldn’t seem like anything. So it’s that combination of what’s predictable and expected and what’s surprising. And this was written for a general audience who, um, who had never, you know, who probably most of them hadn’t heard of Raymond Loewy, and to most of them, they would have found this, uh, unfamiliar.

And, as I read it I thought, “Oh, I know this already.” But they put it in a way that was kind of just really very precise and interesting and, and I found that, it’s like… I apologize to anyone who’s ever heard another podcast by me because I swear to God… You know, I’m constantly falling back on The Goldberg Variations and now this Raymond Loewy formula in the last year or so. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna give it a rest, perhaps after this one, with that good question.

Jp:

[laughter] Yeah.

Michael:

But, I recommend that article. Uh, I think it was called ‘The Four Letter Formula That Will Sell Anything to Anyone’ or something like that. It was in The Atlantic.

Jp:

Cool, thank you. I have just one last one.

Michael:

Go ahead.

Jp:

Which is to conclude it the same way we started, Coke or Pepsi?

Michael:

Oh, I like Coca-Cola, I always have. Yeah.

Jp:

Period. [laughter]

Michael:

Period. Oh, that’s right. [laughter] Yeah, Coke. You know, it’s a real thing. Period. In Helvetica. Period. Exactly right. I sort of forgot about that.

Jp:

Yeah.

Michael:

It’s just a type face to me, is, I forget it’s associated with a soft drink.

Jp:

Oh, yeah. Well, Michael Bierut, thank you so much for being with us and we appreciate your time and…

Michael:

It’s a pleasure now, guys. Thank you for having me.

Jp:

Thank you.