Right top The Good Diner was an experiment in vernacular design processes. No drawing was made for the neon sign; I simply dictated the words to the fabricator over the phone and said to make the second line the biggest, the first and third lines the next biggest, and so on, and to use whatever colors he thought looked nice. It was a tense but ultimately satisfying moment when the final product was delivered. Right bottom At one point, our clients hesitated about the name, fearing that the equivocal adjective might be too wimpy for their truck-driving clientele. “Okay, how about The Fuckin’ Good Diner?” I suggested. We kept the original name. Above For a diner, matchbooks serve as the annual report, corporate image campaign, and 60-second Super Bowl ad, all in one. 82 The Good Diner 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 82 30/04/2015 14:0
Far left In a luxurious gesture, Woody Pirtle’s logo was installed in hand-cut linoleum at the entrance. Left The railing connecting the counter area to the main dining room could be read alternately as “Good” or “Goop” depending on your reaction to the food. Above With no budget for art but lots of walls to fill, we simply put objects on a photocopier and blew them up. The framed images represent the four primal elements: wind, water, fire, and earth. We’re not sure anyone noticed. Next spread Why settle for one color of Naugahyde when you can have them all? The installers determined the order of colors at the counter. 83 30/04/2015 14:01 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 8
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How to run a marathon The Architectural League of New York Above The original seal of the Architectural League, which I avoided changing for over 20 years. Opposite The Architectural League hosts the Beaux Arts Ball, the architectural community’s party of the year, with a new theme every time. In 2013, we responded to the somewhat esoteric concept of “ism” with pure typography. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 87 A few weeks into my first job, my boss Massimo Vignelli summoned me into his office. I was a naive kid from Ohio and I barely knew what I was doing. Massimo and his wife and partner, Lella, were going to Italy for a month, and he told me to follow up on a project he was doing for an organization called the Architectural League of New York. I liked architecture but my knowledge didn’t extend much beyond Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Roark. Suddenly I was on the phone with Richard Meier, Michael Graves, and Frank Gehry, chasing down material for the organization’s centennial exhibition. My education was about to begin. My postgraduate academy was the Architectural League. Founded in 1881 to bring together architects with other creative practitioners, the League has always included artists and designers of all disciplines in its leadership. As a board member, Massimo Vignelli served as the organization’s pro bono graphic design consultant. As Massimo’s assistant, I took over the (free) work we were doing on their behalf. Ten years later I was appointed to the board myself. Twenty-plus years after that I am still working for them. This marathon run is the longest sustained relationship I’ve enjoyed in my professional life. Designers are often asked to create images for organi- zations. We come in from the outside, get our bearings, and give the best advice we can. Working as an external consultant like this, I design systems for others to implement and hope and pray they get it right after I’m gone. Working for the League year after year after year, I learned the pleasures of working from the inside. There are no formal graphic standards, but there is an evolving portrait of an organization where the paint never quite dries. For years, I resisted designing a logo, viewing each new assignment as an open brief, a chance to extend the League’s visual profile. Over time, certain patterns began to emerge—we finally did create a logo, for instance—but still each assignment offers the very best (and scariest) kind of challenge: if you could do anything you wanted, what would you do? 87 30/04/2015 14:0
Right Early in my time working for the Architectural League, I designed several lecture invitations that also functioned as miniature posters. These were the first instances that Massimo Vignelli encouraged me to sign my own work. Opposite Working for the League’s ongoing programs has been a special pleasure. Its Emerging Voices series, which mounts lectures by up-and-coming architects from around the world, began in 1981 and continues today. Its poster series is a not-so-subtle homage to my childhood obsession with the album covers designed by John Berg and Nick Fasciano for the band Chicago. 88 The Architectural League of New York 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 88 30/04/2015 14:0
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Below The remarkable 30-year legacy of the Emerging Voices series culminated with our design for Idea, Form, Resonance, a 300-page book documenting the League’s remarkable ability to identify mid-career architects destined for worldwide influence. These have included Brad Cloepfil, James Corner, Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, Teddy Cruz, SHoP, and Jeanne Gang. 90 The Architectural League of New York 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 90 30/04/2015 14:0
Left Since the early 1980s, my clients at the League have been executive director Rosalie Genevro and program director Anne Rieselbach. By now, our communication is nearly telepathic. Nonetheless, they still reject as many of my ideas as they accept. The Architectural League’s competition for young designers has a different theme every year, and my feigned exasperation with it is a cherished part of our relationship. I recall that 1987’s Bridges theme was particularly vexing. 91 30/04/2015 14:01 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 9
Right The poster for the 1999 competition responded directly to the theme, Scale, with an oversized poster that would be unlikely in today’s sustainability- conscious digital age. 92 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 92 30/04/2015 14:0
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Below When the League moved to new offices in Soho, we created this homage to the cover of Paolo Soleri’s Visionary Cities. 94 The Architectural League of New York 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 94 30/04/2015 14:0
Below The Beaux Arts Ball is the high point of the social calendar for any trendy New York architect. In 2006, the theme was Dot Dot Dot, with appropriately customized typography. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 95 95 30/04/2015 14:0
Right The poster for the 1999 Beaux Arts Ball became one of the League’s most enduring images. 96 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 96 30/04/2015 14:0
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Opposite The 2014 Beaux Arts Ball was held at the staggeringly ornate Williamsburgh Savings Bank in Brooklyn. The theme, Craft, was memorialized with an illegibly baroque insignia. Right For years, I felt the Architectural League’s logo wasn’t important, that dramatic posters communicated more powerfully than any symbol could. This changed with the rise of digital commu nications and social media. In response, we created a wordmark that imbeds their colloquial name within their formal one. Above and right In 2011, Massimo and Lella Vignelli were the recipients of the League’s prestigious President’s Medal. The programs we designed featured five different Vignelli quotes—in Helvetica, of course. The untrimmed press sheet became an informal poster, and a way for me to honor the man whose generosity transformed my life. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 99 99 30/04/2015 14:0
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How to avoid the obvious Minnesota Children’s Museum Opposite Drew, Liz, and Martha Bierut model the Minnesota Children’s Museum’s graphic identity. Having kids of my own helped me understand how to design for them. Above Business cards remind staff members that theirs is truly a hands-on destination. Photographer Judy Olausen used local kids as hand models. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 101 Graphic designers have a love/hate relationship with clichés (“love/hate relationship” being itself a cliché). In design
school, we’re taught that the goal of design is to create something new. But not entirely new. A jar of spaghetti sauce should stand out from its competitors. But if it looks too different, say, like a can of motor oil, it will disorient shoppers and scare them away. Every graphic design solution, then, must navigate between comfort and cliché. Pentagram founder Alan Fletcher admired this “ability to stroke a cliché until it purrs like a metaphor.” In 1995, the Minnesota Children’s Museum was moving from a cramped but cozy space in a shopping mall to a beautiful new building in downtown St. Paul designed by up-and-coming architects Julie Snow and Vincent James. We were asked to do the signage and graphics. Inevitably, the clichés poured out. Crayon markings. Bright primary colors. Building blocks, balloons, smiley faces. In design, as in life, the antidote to stereotype is experience. Forget about the abstract idea of “children’s museums.” What makes this particular children’s museum special? Ann Bitter, the museum’s dynamic director, described her ambitions and confessed her fears. The new building was beautiful, she said, but she worried about losing the intimacy that visitors were accustomed to in the museum’s old home. Like most children’s museums, this one provided “hands-on experiences” (another cliché). Would kids feel as comfortable amid the big, beautiful, brand-new architecture? Sometimes avoiding the obvious means embracing it— and wrestling it to the ground. Children’s hands, with their invitation to touch and their inherent sense of scale, provided the key. Instead of trying to draw them (silhouettes? crayon scribbles?) we recruited local kids to serve as hand models and photographed them pointing, counting, playing. Today, at the Minnesota Children’s Museum, these hands—of children that are now in their twenties—continue to point the way, and pick out that delicate path between what’s expected and what surprises. 101 30/04/2015 14:0
Left Instead of a logo, the museum combines two dozen photographs of children’s hands in various ways. Right A sculptural hand balancing a clock serves as a central meeting place and reinforces the graphic theme. Right Having decided on hands as a motif, we were lucky that the building had five floors rather than six. 102 Minnesota Children’s Museum 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 102 30/04/2015 14:0
Below Children’s hands point the way throughout the building, providing a sense of scale and, in the case of the bathroom signs, a bit of wit. Above A giant ticket on the auditorium door is torn in half each time the door opens. Next spread For the museum’s grand opening, it celebrated its audience by merging identity and architecture. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 103 103 30/04/2015 14:0
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How to avoid doomsday Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Opposite Our design for the annual report of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announces the current position of the Doomsday Clock, summarizing the assessment of dozens of experts. Above The original clock was the creation of artist Martyl Langsdorf. Called to provide an illustration for the Bulletin’s first magazine cover in 1947, she created a universally compelling image of rare power. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 107 The most powerful piece of information design of the 20th century was designed by a landscape painter. In 1943, nuclear physicist Alexander Langsdorf Jr. was called to Chicago to join hundreds of scientists in a secret wartime project: the race to develop an atomic bomb. Their work on the Manhattan Project made possible the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended World War II. But Langsdorf, like many of his colleagues, greeted the subsequent peace with profound unease. What were the implications of the fact that the human race had invented the means to render itself extinct? To bring this question to a broader audience, Langsdorf and his fellow scientists began circulating a mimeographed newsletter called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In June 1947, the newsletter became a magazine. Langsdorf’s wife, Martyl, was an artist whose landscapes were exhibited in Chicago galleries. She volunteered to create the first cover. There wasn’t much room for an illustration, and the budget permitted only two colors. But she found a solution. The Doomsday Clock was born. Arguments about nuclear proliferation have been complicated and contentious. The Doomsday Clock translates them into a brutally simple visual analogy, merging the looming approach of midnight with the drama of a ticking time bomb. Appropriately for an organization led by scientists, the Clock sidesteps overwrought imagery of mushroom clouds in favor of an instrument of measurement. Martyl set the minute hand at seven to midnight on that first cover “simply because it looked good.” Two years later, the Soviets tested their own nuclear device. The arms race was officially on. To emphasize the seriousness of these circumstances, the clock was moved to three minutes to midnight. It has been moved 20 times since. What a remarkable, clear, concise piece of communication! Several years ago, the organization was looking for a logo. We told them they already had one. That began a relationship with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that still continues. Each year, we publish the report that accompanies the announcement of the Clock’s position. And each year, we hope we turn back time. 107 30/04/2015 14:0
Right and next spread Designer Armin Vit and I suggested that the Doomsday Clock be adopted as the organization’s logo. Its non-specific neutrality has permitted the Bulletin to integrate data on bioterrorism and climate change into the yearly scientific assessment, which has led to 20 changes to the position of the clock’s hands over the past 65 years. 108 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 108 30/04/2015 14:0
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How to be fashionably timeless Saks Fifth Avenue Opposite Saks uses nearly 60 different bags and boxes. Thanks to the variations made possible by the modular logo system, no two are alike. Above The store has been represented by over 40 logos across the years. Most memorable was a calligraphic logo, first introduced in the 1940s and refined in the 1970s. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 113 Terron Schaefer told me I could do anything I wanted. As head of marketing at Saks Fifth Avenue, the New York retail mecca founded in 1924, he had decided the store was ready for a new graphic program. He offered me a blank slate. There is nothing I like less than a blank slate. Where other designers yearn for assignments without constraints, I do best when straining against thorny problems, baggage burdened histories, and impossible-to-reconcile demands. Luckily, buried in Terron’s assignment was a tantalizing challenge. The store was proud of its heritage and the authority it conferred. Yet it also offered up-to-the-minute fashions. And in merging opposites—timelessness and trendiness—they wanted a brand as immediately recognizable as Tiffany with its blue boxes or Burberry with its signature plaid. We tried everything. We set the name in dozens of different typefaces: they looked inauthentic. We tried images of their flagship building: too old. We invented patterns: frustratingly arbitrary. Finally, sensing our exhaustion, Terron made a suggestion: a lot of people, he said, still liked a cursive logo from the 1970s by lettering artist Tom Carnase. A florid bit of stylized Spencerian script, it looked dated to me, but I asked our designer Kerrie Powell to see if it could be refined. Later than afternoon, I glanced at Kerrie’s computer screen from across the room. On it was a small fragment of that dated 1970s logo. The enlarged detail looked as fresh and dramatic as the Nike swoosh. I realized this was it. Solving a design problem happens like so many other things: slowly, then all at once. We divided the cursive logo into 64 squares. Each square was a dramatic abstract composition. Together, they generated a nearly infinite number of combinations, perfect for boxes and bags. The new graphic language at once evoked the history of the store and the promise of perpetual newness. For Saks Fifth Avenue, the
answer was there all along. 113 30/04/2015 14:0
How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things Page 4
