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Michael Bierut
‘The biggest challenge that faces a designer isn’t the quest for novelty, but coming to grips with the fact that much of what we do has little content’
Michael Beirut was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1957. He studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, graduating in 1980. Prior to joining Pentagram in 1990 as a partner in the firm’s New York office, he worked for ten years at Vignelli Associates, ultimately as vice-president of graphic design. His clients at Pentagram have included Alfred A. Knopf, Disney Development Company, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Princeton University and Interiors Magazine. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Montreal. He was president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1988 to 1990 and is a member of the AIGA’s national board. He has been director of the American Centre for Design and was elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 1989. In 1991, he chaired the AIGA National Conference in Chicago with his fellow Pentagram partner Paula Scher. Recent activities include the identity and environmental graphics for a new children’s museum in St Paul, Minnesota, and co-ordinating all promotional material for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He is the graphic design consultant to Mohawk Paper Mills and edits its annual critical journal Rethinking Design. He is a Senior Critic in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art and co-editor, with Steven Heller, of Looking Closer and Looking Closer 2, anthologies of writing on graphic design.
Steven Heller: When did you decide to become a graphic designer?
Michael Beirut: I grew up in Ohio, in a milieu that had nothing resembling graphic design. Because I drew well, I was the guy who always designed the logo for the clubhouse or painted the band’s name on the drum. I didn’t know it had a name until I found a book by [former CBS art director] S. Neil Fujita in the school library. It was part of a series called something like Your Future in …Cosmetology, or Garbage Disposal, or Plumbing, and there was one called Your Future in Commercial Art/Graphic Design. Up to that moment I thought this stuff got done by Robert Rauschenburg or Franz Kline or Frank Stella banging it out on a Saturday; they’d put aside the paintings with the slashes and the stripes, and do a Three Dog Night cover. When I found out it had a name – I was fifteen years old – I went to the Parma Regional Library in Ohio and looked up graphic design in the card catalogue. They had one book: Graphic Design Manual by Armin Hofmann.
SH: What was your reaction to it?
MB: All these pictures of dots and squares hypnotised me. After repeatedly taking this book out of the library I went to a department store in downtown Cleveland and asked it they had it, expecting to get a frown and a puzzled look. Instead the saleswoman said, ‘Oh, yeah, we just got that in for Christmas.’ She led me to this pile of books, but it was a book called Graphic Design by Milton Glaser, with Bob Dylan on the front. So there were two books – one by Glaser and one by Armin Hofmann, that seemed diametrically opposed.
SH: You were at the crossroads of Modernism and eclecticism, in which direction did you go?
MB: I went to the University of Cincinnati, a school where most of the instructors were either born in Switzerland and had studied with Hofmann or had studied at Yale. It was a very Yale-Swiss kind of education – rather than the Glaser tradition.
SH: Is that how you wanted to practice?
MB: I was really good at it, but I was always very promiscuous and would do freelance jobs where I would just rip off anyone that struck my fancy.
SH: When you left school, did you see a particular place for yourself to fit in?
MB: I wanted to work for someone really, really good. It was either Milton Glaser, Chermayeff & Geismar, or Massimo Vignelli. I got Massimo on a good day.
SH: You worked at Vignelli Associates for ten years, What did you learn?
MB: Probably the most interesting thing I learned is that a lot of the things about design that tend to get designers really interested aren’t that important.
SH: Do you mean the decorative aspects of design?
MB: More or less. See, Massimo would arrive at things from an ideological point of view. For instance, he has always had this thing about there being only five good typefaces: Garamond 3, Futura, Century, Helvetica and Bodini. I agreed with this, not so much as a moral issue, but for the practical reason that ordinary people like my mom could only distinguish between five typefaces, and that the time some designers would spend splitting hairs between Garamond and Bembo and Sabon was a waste. Likewise all the attention designers give to clever layouts and putting the page numbers in a cool place, when ordinary people just want to read the words and look at the pictures. Massimo taught me to focus on the big ideas, and I thought that big ideas were what connected with the greatest number of people . . .
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