How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things

by Michael Bierut

  Right It took me a while to find my favorite notebook. Early ones have lined or gridded paper, which I came to dislike. Much of my time over the last few decades was consumed by a quest for notebooks with unlined pages. These pages from 1995 show the sketches for what would become our design for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival (see page 44). 18 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 18 30/04/2015 14:0

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  Right Usually the pages are filled with meeting notes, phone numbers, and columns of numbers. In this case I must have been bored during a meeting. The final poster (see page 63) looked like none of these. 20 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 20 30/04/2015 14:0

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  Right These quick sketches served as shorthand for me and my fellow designers as we discussed the packaging program for Saks Fifth Avenue (see page 112). 22 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 22 30/04/2015 14:0

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  Right Sometimes a detailed sketch is enough to get an idea out of my system. For this poster for a Yale symposium on the architect Charles Moore, we went with the simpler approach (see page 144, bottom left). 24 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 24 30/04/2015 14:0

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  Right Sketches for a New York Times assignment (see page 156) commingled with a list of unreturned phone calls. It seems to have taken me four tries to solve this one. 26 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 26 30/04/2015 14:0

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  Right “Process, materials, transformation”: in my note- books, the words are usually more important than the pictures (see page 164). 28 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 28 30/04/2015 14:0

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  Right There is nothing glamorous about working out a layout grid, as I am reminded by my sketches for Billboard’s chart pages (see page 216). 30 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 30 30/04/2015 14:0

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  Right I filled two pages with notes on the relationship between the various components that make up the MIT Media Lab (see page 292). 32 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 32 30/04/2015 14:0

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  Right After a number offalse starts, I hit on a simple concept for a logo for the Robin Hood Foundation’s Library Initiative (see page 306). Generating more ideas than we would ever actually need reassured me that we were on the right track. 34 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 34 30/04/2015 14:0

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  Left The butterfly ballot was not a new invention, but its flaws threw the 2000 election into chaos. Above Theresa LePore, the 21st century’s most influential graphic designer. Below It took more than a month to determine the election’s outcome, still disputed 15 years later. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 36 30/04/2015 14:0

  How to destroy the world with graphic design American Institute of Graphic Arts Above An alternate design, using the same format, demonstrates how confusion could have been avoided. It was the fall of the year 2000, and Theresa LePore had a problem. As supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County, Florida, she was not a trained graphic designer, but her challenge was one that every graphic designer in the world has faced: too much text, not enough space. In this case, the text couldn’t be edited. It was the list of candidates for president and vice president in the upcoming national election. The format couldn’t be changed. It was the ballot for the Palm Beach County voting machines, on which voters would register their choice by punching out a hole adjacent to the name of their preferred candidate. But this year, there were too many candidates to fit in a single column. So LePore came up with a new layout. She alternated the names on either side of the holes, first on the left, second on the right, third on the left, and so on. This turned out to be a problem on election day. The first name on the left side of the ballot was George W. Bush. If you wanted to vote for him, you punched the first hole. Right under Bush’s name was Al Gore’s. But if you punched the second hole, you wouldn’t be voting for Gore, but for archconservative Pat Buchanan, the first name on the right side of the holes. Confused? You aren’t alone. The Palm Beach Post later estimated that over 2,800 Gore voters accidentally voted for Buchanan. As it turned out, Florida’s votes, counted and recounted over a month, decided the election’s outcome. And Palm Beach County decided Florida’s. Bush won the state by a margin of 537 votes. By this count, Theresa LePore’s design gave the presidency to George W. Bush. Compared with architecture and product design, graphic design seems ephemeral and harmless. Bad typesetting, as they say, never killed anybody. But in this case, the execution of a trivial, aggravating job—laying out a humble government form—ended up affecting the fate of millions around the world. It was such a dramatic demonstration that I made it into a poster for the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Human beings communicate with words and images. Good graphic designers know how to make those elements effective. And every once in a while that really matters. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 37 37 30/04/2015 14:0

  Right The disastrous ballot, a perfect demonstra- tion of the importance of effective graphic design, illustrated a poster we created for the 2001 national conference of our professional organization, the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Scheduled in Washington, DC, for mid September, it was postponed by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. 38 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 38 30/04/2015 14:0

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  How to have an idea The International Design Center, New York Above I mastered Massimo Vignelli’s trademark approach to the point where I fancied people couldn’t tell our work apart: his poster above, mine below. Opposite I was so pleased with this design that I hurried home to show it to my wife, Dorothy. “Who did this drawing?” she asked. Me, I said. “Well,” she said, “who are you going to get to do it?” With no budget, I stuck with my naive doodle and the conviction that the idea was good enough to surmount the crudeness of the execution. To this day, it is my favorite piece from the first ten years of my career. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 41 I had been working for Massimo Vignelli for four years, devoting my days to mastering what I thought of as “the Vignelli style”: a few preapproved typefaces, two or three bright colors, and structural elements like lines and stripes, all deployed on a modular grid. I enjoyed mimicry and flattered myself with the delusion that Massimo couldn’t tell the difference between my designs and his. Now he had entrusted me with a big client, a complex offurniture showrooms called the International Design Center, New York. We set the ground rules at the outset: the typeface, Bodoni; the color, PMS Warm Red. As long as I stuck to those ingredients, I was on my own. I worked with the brilliant young marketing manager Fern Mallis, a quick-talking New Yorker who was my favorite client. She asked me to design invitations for two upcoming events: an exhibition of experimental furniture and a lecture by NASA scientists on designing spacecraft interiors. I was excitedly completing designs for both invitations (Bodoni, PMS Warm Red) when my phone rang. It was Fern. “I’m afraid we just got our budget cut, and we can only afford one invitation. Can you combine them?” “No, of course not,” I sputtered. The two subjects were completely different: end tables and outer space. No one will come to either event. Plus, I liked the designs I had already done. Fern didn’t budge. I hung up the phone in frustration. Clients! Would it never get easier? How was one supposed to work under these conditions? What were they expecting, something like this? Almost without thinking, intending to do nothing more than demonstrate the impossibility of the problem, I did a drawing. Viewed one way, it was a table and a vase offlowers
. Upside down, a rocket ship. I was smart enough to realize this drawing was the answer. Like everything else I did for this client, it was in Bodoni and PMS Warm Red. But people don’t care about typefaces and colors. They are merely the delivery mechanisms for something else: ideas. And my drawing, crude as it was, was an idea, something with the capacity to surprise, engage, and amuse people. It was at that moment of scribbling I realized content is more important than form. 41 30/04/2015 14:0

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  How to transcend style American Center for Design Opposite Adults think they can imitate children’s handwriting. Don’t bother. Today, the American Center for Design is long gone, but my daughter Elizabeth is still with us, an attorney practicing in Manhattan. She has no memory of lettering this poster. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 43 When style is referred to in design circles, it’s usually disparagingly. Most designers claim to “have no style,” inventing new approaches for each assignment. Original design work is said to be reduced to “mere style” by those who imitate it. Shallow cosmeticians are dismissed by their critics as trafficking in “nothing but style.” Yet in any artistic activity style is inescapable. This is particularly true in graphic design, where the functional requirements of most projects are minimal. A business card has to bear legible type and fit in a wallet. After that, all the decisions—typeface, color, layout, material, production technique—are bafflingly arbitrary, what regular people call “a matter of taste.” But ask a designer about the last time a meeting degenerated into a taste discussion. It was probably yesterday, and the memory will not be pleasant. In the early 1990s, still fresh from my ten years at Vignelli Associates, I was desperate to find my own voice, and at a total loss as to how to do it. With the design world roiled by change, from the typographic daring of Emigre to the experimental invention of Cranbrook and CalArts, I brooded about the seeming impossibility of moving beyond style. Consumed as I was with soul searching, it was ironic to be asked to chair the world’s most progressive (and stylish) design competition, the American Center for Design’s 100 Show, and create the poster that would invite my fellow designers to participate. Predictably, weeks of paralysis followed. An increasingly panicked ACD staff wondered if I was up to the task. Finally, I was asked to at least write the statement that would appear on the announcement’s reverse side. I responded with a stream of consciousness that would have been better suited to an analyst’s couch. They liked it, and suggested I simply run the text on the front of the poster. Ah, an all-type solution. But what typeface? The decision was now reduced to its toughest core. Should I pander to the trendsetters with a newly designed grunge font? Hold strong with the modernists with Helvetica? Or play it safe with Garamond No. 3? At the last possible moment, the solution hit me. I dictated the text, letter by letter, to my four-year-old daughter Elizabeth. The innocence of the form vanquished the weary cynicism of the content, and I was free at last. 43 30/04/2015 14:0

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  How to create identity without a logo Brooklyn Academy of Music Next spread By treating the bland sans serif News Gothic typeface in a distinctive way, we created a look that says “BAM” even if the logo is nowhere in sight. Coinci- dentally, the typeface was designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1908, the same year that the BAM Opera House opened. Opposite Founded in 1861, BAM’s early decades saw performances by Enrico Caruso, Sarah Bernhardt, and Isadora Duncan. Over 100 years later, Harvey Lichtenstein gave alternative performers like Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, Pina Bausch, and Peter Brook their first large-scale American venue there. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 45 When the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the oldest continuously operating performing arts center in the United States, fell on hard times in the 1960s, it was saved by a young visionary, Harvey Lichtenstein, who remade it as a destination for the global avant-garde. Lichtenstein’s Next Wave Festival stole the standard of progressive performance from Manhattan, and launched an unstoppable revival of Brooklyn that continues to this day. In 1995, after years of experimenting with different graphic approaches for the Next Wave, BAM asked us to create something permanent. (“You don’t keep changing the Marlboro Man,” said board member Bill Campbell, longtime head of marketing for Philip Morris.) From now on, they wanted everything—from a poster to a 36-page subscription mailer to a small-space ad—to simply look like BAM. What they didn’t want was a logo. I was inspired by the legendary midcentury advertising art director Helmut Krone. “I’ve spent my whole life fighting logos,” he once said. “A logo says, ‘I am an ad. Turn the page.’” Instead, he created indelible identities for his clients by making distinctive choices and deploying them relentlessly, most famously on behalf of Volkswagen, still using the combination offutura and white space that he introduced in his “Think small” ad in 1959. So I hit on the idea of using one typeface, workhorse News Gothic, but with a twist: we would cut the type off, as if it couldn’t fit in the frame. As I explained to Harvey and his colleagues Karen Brooks Hopkins and Joe Melillo, this suggested that BAM crossed borders and couldn’t be contained on a single stage. But it was economical, too, allowing us to use four-inch-tall letters in two inches’ worth of space. It was like seeing King Kong’s eye in your bedroom window, I explained. Even if you couldn’t see the whole beast, you knew it was big. The new look for the Next Wave launched in 1995. The idiosyncratic headline treatment (dubbed “Cuisinart typography” by BAM’s longtime architectural consultant Hugh Hardy) was disorienting at first. Twenty years later, it is inextricably linked to BAM. 45 30/04/2015 14:0

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  Below right By mounting the hand on a metronome motor, we made the Next “Wave” pun a bit more obvious. Below left Getting printers to manufacture cups with the type going off the bottom is harder than you’d think: they can’t believe you want to print them “wrong.” The late design genius Tibor Kalman was once asked to design a brand identity for a museum. Rather than designing a logo, he handed the client a book of typefaces and said to simply pick one and use it over and over again: if they did that long enough, they’d have an identity. He was right. I’m convinced the most important characteristic for a great brand is consistency. This is different from sameness. Sameness is static and lifeless. Consistency is responsive and vibrant. Working with, yes, just one typeface, BAM is a model of consistency. 48 Brooklyn Academy of Music 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 48 30/04/2015 14:0

  Next spread Contemporary lettering collides with the BAM Opera House’s century-old Beaux-Arts details. Left bottom Even the BAM bathroom icons are subject to chopping. Left top The Majestic Theatre was renamed the BAM Harvey Theater when Lichtenstein retired in 1999. Below After resisting creating a logo for several years, we finally made one using BAM’s signature typography. The guidelines for use, created by designer Emily Hayes Campbell and only six pages long, are still faithfully followed. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 49 49 30/04/2015 14:0

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  How to invent a town that was always there Celebration, Florida Opposite Our designs in Celebration, Florida, are ubiquitous, including places that usually escape notice, like manhole covers. Above Walt Disney’s original dream to create a futuristic utopia in central Florida morphed into a theme park, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), which opened in 1982. A dozen years later, Celebration, built on considerably different theories, broke ground. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 53 If you drive down Interstate 4 in central Florida, exit on Route 192, and make a right turn at a long white fence, you will enter another world. Traditional houses with front porches on small lots set close to the street. A town center with the scale of a classic Main Stree
t, small shops lining the sidewalks. Parks and schools within an easy walk. It is utterly unlike the world of parking lots and warehouse stores that surrounds it, and it is all about twenty years old. This is Celebration, Florida. In the early 1990s, the Walt Disney Company decided to take 5,000 acres of land it had acquired around its theme park properties and try something new: residential development. CEO Michael Eisner was passionate about design, and he enlisted architects Robert A. M. Stern and Jaquelin Robertson to plan the project. They proposed a large-scale experiment in New Urbanism, design principles that call for planning small-scale, mixed-use communities similar to towns familiar from a century ago. Among the traditional homes are public buildings by some of the most famous architects in the world: a town hall by Philip Johnson, a post office by Michael Graves, and a bank by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. It was our job to create all the graphics: the street signs, the names over the shops, the markings at the holes at the public golf course, even the manhole covers. Authenticity is a tricky thing, especially for a graphic designer. We are not just creators ofform but communicators of ideas. This requires fluency in a common language, an ability to manipulate elements that are widely, if subconsciously, understood—typefaces, colors, images. There is a reason a sign in an airport looks different from a sign on a small town street corner. To create graphics that 7,500 people would have to live with, day in and day out, was a challenge. Our goal in Celebration was to become part of the scenery. I have worked with many idealistic clients, but none more so than the team that created Celebration. We were inventing a new world, and it was thrilling. Today the town is not so new anymore. And the older it gets, the more I like it. 53 30/04/2015 14:0