How to 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 1 30/04/2015 14:0
How to use graphic design to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry, and (every once in a while) change the world 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 2 30/04/2015 14:0
How to use graphic design to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry, and (every once in a while) change the world 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 3 30/04/2015 14:0
First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX How to © Michael Bierut 2015 Typeset in NeueHelvetica DOT Used by special arrangement with Monotype and the New York City Department of Transportation Written and designed by Michael Bierut Production management by Sonsoles Alvarez with Chloe Scheffe Production supervision by Julia Lindpaintner Design supervision by Hamish Smyth Editorial consulting by Andrea Monfried Copy editing by Rebecca McNamara All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-500-51826-7 Manufactured in China by Imago To find out about all our publications, please visit www.thamesandhudson.com. There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 4 01/06/2015 12:5
First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 as How to ISBN 978-0-500-51826-7 by Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181a High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX How to © Michael Bierut 2015 Typeset in NeueHelvetica DOT Used by special arrangement with Monotype and the New York City Department of Transportation Written and designed by Michael Bierut Production management by Sonsoles Alvarez with Chloe Scheffe Production supervision by Julia Lindpaintner Design supervision by Hamish Smyth Editorial consulting by Andrea Monfried Copy editing by Rebecca McNamara This electronic version first published in 2015 by Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181a High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX To find out about all our publications, please visit www.thamesandhudson.com All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN 978-0-500-77307-9
Contents 10 How to be a graphic designer in the middle of nowhere An introduction 16 How to think with your hands Four decades of notebooks 36 How to destroy the world with graphic design American Institute of Graphic Arts 40 How to have an idea The International Design Center, New York 42 How to transcend style American Center for Design 44 How to create identity without a logo Brooklyn Academy of Music 52 How to invent a town that was always there Celebration, Florida 60 How to work for free Parallax Theater 66 How to raise a billion dollars Princeton University 70 How to win a close game New York Jets 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 5 30/04/2015 14:0
80 How to be good The Good Diner 86 How to run a marathon The Architectural League of New York 100 How to avoid the obvious Minnesota Children’s Museum 106 How to avoid doomsday Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 1 1 2 How to be fashionably timeless Saks Fifth Avenue 124 How to cross cultures New York University Abu Dhabi 130 How to behave in church The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine 138 How to disorient an architect Yale University School of Architecture 154 How to put a big sign on a glass building without blocking the view The New York Times Building 164 How to make a museum mad Museum of Arts and Design 172 How to judge a book Covers and jackets 178 How to make a mark Logotypes and symbols 190 How to squash a vote The Voting Booth Project 192 How to travel through time Lever House 196 How to pack for a long flight United Airlines 204 How to have fun with a brown cardboard box Nuts.com 21 0 How to shut up and listen New World Symphony 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 6 30/04/2015 14:0
282 How to survive on an island Governors Island 292 How to design two dozen logos at once MIT Media Lab 306 How to save the world with graphic design The Robin Hood Foundation’s Library Initiative 318 Acknowledgments 320 Image credits 216 How to top the charts Billboard 224 How to convince people Ted 234 How to get where you want to be New York City Department of Transportation 246 How to investigate a murder A Wilderness of Error 252 How to be who you are Mohawk Fine Papers 258 How to get the passion back American Institute of Architects 266 How to make news Charlie Rose 274 How to set a table The restaurants of Bobby Flay 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 7 30/04/2015 14:0
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“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” Chuck Close 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 9 30/04/2015 14:0
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How to be a graphic designer in the middle of nowhere An introduction Opposite My first mass-produced piece of graphic design was a poster for our high school production of Wait Until Dark, a tense drama about a blind woman threatened by a criminal gang (hence the eyes). I can still remember the thrill of seeing it hanging in every hallway of my high school. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 11 As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a graphic designer. I must have been no more than five or six years old. I was in the car with my father on a Saturday on my way to get a haircut. We were stopped at a light, and my dad pointed at a forklift truck parked in a nearby lot. “Isn’t that neat?” he asked. What, I said. “Look at the way they wrote ‘Clark.’” Clark was the logo on the side of the truck. I didn’t get it. “See how the letter L is lifting up the letter A?” explained my father. “It’s doing what the truck does.” It was as if an amazing secret had been revealed, right there in plain sight. I was dumbfounded and thrilled. How long had this been going on? Were these small miracles hidden all over the place? And who was responsible for creating them? I was in the first grade at St. Theresa’s School in Garfield Heights, Ohio, when my teachers first noticed that I was good at drawing. This was no small thing. I was a good student, but among my peers in 1960s suburban Cleveland, academic diligence was viewed with suspicion, if not outright contempt. Artistic ability, on the other hand, was like a kind of magic. Inept at sports and generally withdrawn, I suddenly had a way to distinguish myself in the schoolyard. The nuns called it a “God-given talent,” and I milked it for all it was worth. Luckily, I received nothing but encouragement from my parents. They bought me a succession of ever-more esoteric implements (charcoal sticks! pastels! kneaded erasers!) and signed me up for Saturday morning art classes at one of the world’s great cultural institutions, the Cleveland Museum of Art. By the time I reached junior high school, I could render anything realistically. Everyone assumed I would be an artist when I grew up. Art was something I used to make friends (and, occa- sionally, to keep from getting beaten up). At the request of one of the school’s more frightening bullies, I painstakingly replicated the Budweiser logo on the cover of his civics notebook. Having acquired a Speedball pen set and having mastered a convincing Fraktur, I generated heavy metal insignia upon request. 11 30/04/2015 14:0
A turning point came in the ninth grade when I was asked to do a poster for the school play. I handed in the artwork on a Friday morning, it was printed that afternoon, and by Monday morning my poster was hanging all over the school. This was my first experience with the miracle of mass production. More people would see my poster than would see the play. I realized then I didn’t want to settle for just doing a sin
gle painting to be stuck on the wall at someplace like the Cleveland Museum of Art. I wanted to create things with a purpose, things that people would see all over the place, things that were about something other than themselves. It was hard to explain. I had no idea how posters and logos came into the world. I didn’t know any working artists, and didn’t know anyone else to ask. If pressed, I would have guessed that things like album covers were designed by real artists like Franz Kline and Robert Rauschenberg who had decided to take a day off and make some extra money. One day, I was in our school library, idly browsing the Career Resource Center. This was a grandiose name for what was no more than a shelf bearing a matched set of books called the Aim High Vocational Series. The titles included Aim for a Job in Baking, Aim for a Job in the Dry Cleaning Industry, and Aim for a Job in Domestic Help Occupations. One caught my eye: Aim for a Job in Graphic Design/Art by someone named S. Neil Fujita. I opened it and realized with a start that I was staring at my future. Here were page after page of men and women who were doing what I wanted to do, with examples of work from ad man George Lois, magazine designer Ruth Ansel, and television art director Lou Dorfsman. I now realized this activity that fascinated me had a name: graphic design. Newly armed and wanting more, I went to my local public library and looked up those two words in the card catalog. There was exactly one book listed. It was Graphic Design Manual: Principles and Practice by Armin Hofmann. An introduction Above Easter Sunday, 1969, in Parma, Ohio. I’m standing with my parents, Leonard and Anne Marie, and behind my twin brothers, Ronald and Donald. Above My parents enrolled me in Saturday morning art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Here is my rendition of a masterpiece in their collection, J. M. W. Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons. I was seven years old. 12 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 12 30/04/2015 14:0
Looking back, I am utterly mystified that this obscure book, a dry account of the coursework at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland, ended up on the shelves of a small suburban library in Parma, Ohio. At the time, I was electrified. From the black-and-white studies of dots and squares to the exercises involving the redesign of European lightbulb packages, I devoured it all. After checking it out repeatedly—as far as I knew, I was the only one who ever did—I told my parents that the only thing I wanted for Christmas was my very own copy. My mother, God bless her, called every store in town, miraculously finding someone who had just gotten it in stock. I opened it on Christmas morning to discover my poor mother’s mistake. She had accidentally bought me Graphic Design by Milton Glaser, 240 glorious pages of unfettered eclecticism from the cofounder of Push Pin Studios, without a trace of dogma in sight. My career was set in motion by these three books: a pragmatic guide by an East Coast journeyman, a rigorous manifesto by a Swiss theoretician, and a dazzling tour de force by a brilliant virtuoso. I was barely 18 years old, and without ever having met a graphic designer in person, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Somehow, my high school guidance counselor found just the right college for me at the opposite end of the state, where the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, and Art offered a five-year program in graphic design. There I was plunged into a milieu that owed more to the minimalism of the Swiss Kunstgewerbeschule and less to the vibrant worldview of Push Pin Studios. Submitting myself to a boot camp’s worth of punishing visual exercises, I unlearned my bad habits and replaced them with the basics of design, typography, color, and layout. Imagination and energy may be innate traits, but precision and craftsmanship are skills that can only be mastered through hard practice. Our professors were determined that no one graduate without them. It was telling that the degree I received was a bachelor of science, for in Cincinnati I mastered a kind of design that was as logical, self contained, and elegant as the laws of physics. It was later in New York that I would discover the power of passion. 13 01/06/2015 12:54 Today, everyone knows Hofmann and Glaser, but Fujita is an unsung hero: he designed the Columbia Records logo and the cover of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Above These are the three books that changed my life: Aim for a Job in Graphic Design/Art by S. Neil Fujita, Graphic Design Manual: Principles and Practice by Armin Hofmann, and Graphic Design by Milton Glaser. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 1
Above left Here I am looking pensive in the studios at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, and Art, circa 1976. Above right By the time I left Cincinnati, I had mastered the use of Helvetica and modular grid systems. I was never any good at photography; I didn’t tell my teachers that my girlfriend Dorothy actually took this picture. (I married Dorothy in 1980.) Above I worked for Massimo and Lella Vignelli for ten years. They were my surrogate parents, and their studio was my adoptive family. In retrospect, it wasn’t a surprise that Massimo Vignelli loved my portfolio: sans serif typefaces on every page, modular grids underpinning every layout. After all, this was the acclaimed designer who had introduced Helvetica to the United States, created a relentlessly geometric map for the New York subway system, and devised a system to ensure that every national park from Acadia to Yosemite would have a matching brochure. With his wife, Lella, Massimo ran a Manhattan office from which issued a mind-boggling stream of logos, posters, books, interiors, and products. In the summer of 1980, I married my high school sweetheart, Dorothy, and moved to New York to become Vignelli Associates’ newest and most junior employee. I was in awe of Massimo and couldn’t believe my luck. But I also knew that my new boss had a strong point of view, and that his designers worked within clearly prescribed aesthetic limits. My plan was to spend 18 months there and move on. I ended up staying ten years. Despite the firm’s reputation for modernist austerity, Lella and Massimo presided over a workplace of extraordinary warmth, filled with noise and laughter and varied, exciting projects. Design there was a sacred calling, and in joining the profession you were committing to a fight against stupidity and ugliness. The clients who came to us were enlisting in the same battle. It helped that I was a good, even compulsive, mimic. Having learned my earliest lessons about graphic design by copying from library books, I found it impossible not to imitate Massimo’s unmistakable style. He came to trust me, and continued to encourage me even when my ideas began to diverge from his. After ten years, I was managing the firm’s graphic design operations. But more and more I wondered: what kind of work would I do if I were on my own? The answer came in the form of a dinner invitation from a colleague, Woody Pirtle. Woody was a partner in the New York office of a firm called Pentagram, legendary for its unique structure. Its partners worked in a hierarchy-free collective, each managing a small design team, each sharing the resources of an international organization. 14 An introduction 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 14 30/04/2015 14:0
A casual conversation about my future turned into something else. Over coffee, he asked if I might be interested in becoming Pentagram’s newest partner. His timing was perfect. I loved the bustle of a big office. The loneliness of a sole proprietorship held little appeal. Combining autonomy and community, Pentagram offered the best of both worlds. I thought about it overnight, talked it over with Dorothy, and said yes. In the fall of 1990, I started my second job. My second job may be my last job. I’ve been at Pentagram for nearly 25 years. And, to a remarkable extent, I am doing exactly what I always wanted to do. I still recall the seismic jolt of seeing that forklift truck logo, or opening that book in my school library. What I couldn’t figure out then was how people came to make these kinds of things. Where did the ideas come from? What happened between an idea and its realization? How could you tell if the ideas worked? How were people talked into accepting them? Was it magic? Or was there a limit to what graphic design could do? And, finally, how could I get to do it, too? Since my first poster in the ninth grade, I’ve discovered that my questions have many possible answers. Although none of them are final, all of them are interesting. No one can tell you what to do. But once you decide, the real fun is figuring out how to do it. 15 30/04/2015 14:01 Bott
om A more recent partners’ meeting in London, 2014. From left to right: Abbott Miller, John Rushworth, Eddie Opara, Natasha Jen, Luke Hayman, Harry Pearce, Michael Gericke, Lorenzo Apicella, Paula Scher, Angus Hyland, Marina Willer, me, Emily Oberman, Domenic Lippa, William Russell, Daniel Weil, DJ Stout, Naresh Ramchandani, and Justus Oehler. Top A new family: my first international meeting in Antigua, 1990, as the newest partner in the firm’s New York office. I’m seated in the back of the truck, surrounded by Mervyn Kurlansky, Colin Forbes, Theo Crosby, David Hillman, Neil Shakery, John Rushworth, Kenneth Grange, Linda Hinrichs, Etan Manasse, Woody Pirtle, John McConnell, Kit Hinrichs, Alan Fletcher, and Peter Harrison. Peter Saville is at the wheel. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 1
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How to think with your hands Four decades of notebooks Opposite and above For more than 30 years, I’ve seldom gone anywhere without a composition book. As a result, they take a beating. On August 12, 1982, I opened up a standard 7½" by 9¾" composition book and began taking notes on a phone conversation. I forget where the book came from. I may have found it in the supply cabinet of Vignelli Associates, where I had been working for a little over two years. This was the beginning of a habit—or a compulsion—that has continued to this day. I cannot walk into a meeting or start a phone call without my notebook. Other designers have amazing sketchbooks. Not me. A few pages look like they belong to a real designer: drawings, type studies, visual ideas being worked out. But most are filled with to-do lists, phone calls to be returned, budget calculations, meeting notes. In college, I discovered that writing down something helped me remember it later. Paradoxically, that means that a lot of these notes, taken once, are never referred to again. Although I am (or I used to be) a good draughtsman, drawing may no longer be a relevant skill in the digital world. (Knowing how to read is more important than knowing how to draw.) But looking back through the years, I’m surprised by the occasional visual notes in these books, and how often they anticipated the design work to come. Often, in the midst of a dense list of bullet points, there will sit a quick diagram, an embryonic sketch that represented the first step of what would be months of work. When the idea of a personal digital assistant was first described to me, I thought, oh, sort of like my notebook, except a computer. (It’s no accident that the iPad is nearly the same size.) Like most designers, I’m dependent on my digital devices. But my notebook is still with me: diary, sketchbook, security blanket, friend. On August 26, 2013, 31 years after the first, I started notebook number 100. How I would love to fill 100 more. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 17 17 01/06/2015 12:5
How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things Page 1
