Michael Bierut Quotes About Design
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Certain kinds of typeface design and typographic design are designed to persuade: we can make this company look modern if we use a crisp sans serif typeface, or we can make this restaurant look like its been around forever if we use typefaces and layout styles that have been around forever too. But there are other categories, and ballot design is one of them, where the goal should be to be purely functional. There have been notable failures in this category.
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I think that you could design a terrible logo for a good company with great people and they could build it into a great program. Alternatively you could design what seems to be a brilliant logo for people who are not smart or energetic or are incapable of associating with anything positive and it would become a terrible logo.
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Sometimes I will give some very vague directions to the designer that I'm working with on a particular project and they'll come back and surprise me with something that really shows a lot of their own 'hand' in it. Other times I'll have a really clear idea about how I want it done and I'll draw it out pretty precisely and say 'make it look exactly like this' and it will be something where it looks like I can say it was 'fully my design'. The work can also range between the two.
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I actually think it almost works the other way sometimes: making a college textbook, say, look really "user friendly" tends to also make it look less "serious," even if nothing changes other than the design treatment.
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I actually don't think that brand new logos are worth that much or mean that much in and of themselves. So why not have a class of third graders compete to design your logo?
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A lot of times, you design a logo to be timeless, but with something like the Olympics, timelessness is maybe not something you should be going for.
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I had a lot of enthusiasms that were very contradictory, I was never very doctrinaire in the type of design I wanted to do.
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Most people have no idea how much goes into designing a typeface. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet, usually with two versions of each, upper and lower case. Punctuation and alternate characters and numbers - let's not forget numbers - can add another 40 or so.
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I've heard some designers talk about the design process being centred on invention, starting with a blank slate. I admire that and occasionally I'm capable of that, but I have to admit that I really have trouble working with completely open briefs.
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If you do good work for good clients, it will lead to other good work for other good clients. If you do bad work for bad clients, it will lead to other bad work for other bad clients.
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Every little job counts. Design counts.
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A lot of times, you design a logo to be timeless, but with something like the Olympics, timelessness is maybe not something you should be going for. Maybe you should be trying to come up with something that will really become associated with a moment in time, a few weeks, that happened, period. Then you look back, think about it and connect it with that time. It may look dated later but it will be still be evocative.
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Designs that have a whiff of complex impenetrability tends to suggest big, complicated ideas. Academic writing tends to work the same way, I understand.
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The design of the notorious Palm Beach County "butterfly ballot" in the 2000 Presidential election is certainly one of them. But I would say most of the time this is less about a conscious attempt to manipulate an outcome, and more about pure ineptitude.
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People in the UK will say that the design community in the US is much more coherent than other countries. It has no government support at all, so it's really like a grass roots thing.
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Simplicity, wit, and good typography.
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Compared with now when almost everyone knows what graphic design is and has some sort of access to the tools to make it, back then, it was really esoteric, you had to quantify it as being 'like commercial art', as one still does in certain circles. It was a strange thing to want to do for a living.
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It was 4 or 5 years into my first design job before the idea of doing graphic design on computers started taking hold. I started working in 1980, the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, then the real desktop publishing only started coming around in 85-86, but it wasn't really until the end of the decade that the transition became irresistible.
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I have half a dozen designers who work for me, they 'realise' most of the design work, and I act as the design director and the main point of client contact on each project.
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I'm not sure about my design work every time.
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We use the word typography to describe two different things: the design of letterforms, and the layout of typeset passages on a page. Both of those experiences are really important to communicating information, especially when that information involves complex ideas.
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Australia has always put out some good design, particularly environmental graphics. I associate that with Australia, more so that a lot of other places. Whether that has anything to do with the landscape, who knows?
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Not everything is design. But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything.
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I'm always conscious of the context, the history, the specific environment of anything that I design and what it is going to be operating within.
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Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.
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