Michael Bierut

Michael Bierut|Essays

Fitting

Charles Brannock only invented one thing in his life: that metal thing in shoe stores that the salesman uses to measure your feet. Is it the most perfect invention of the 20th century?

Michael Bierut|Baseball

The (Faux) Old Ball Game

Since 1992, every ballpark in America has been designed on the nostalgic model of Baltimore's Camden Yards, including the new parks for the Yankees and the Mets. Why is it impossible to build a baseball stadium that looks like it belongs …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Would It Kill You To Smile?

Thoughts on the enduring influence of bershon, "how you feel when you’re 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture."

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Smartest Logo in the Room

The birth, death, and debate around one of Paul Rand's last logos: the "crooked E" he created for Enron.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Will the Real Ernst Bettler Please Stand Up?

In the late 50s, Swiss designer Ernst Bettler created a series of seemingly harmless posters that brought down a drug company with a Nazi past. It's a great story, but it never happened. Why do we need to believe in Ernst Bettler?

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Most Hated Holiday Song in the World

Ten years ago, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid attempted to create the most irritating song in the world. It's now available online, and it's perfect for the holidays!

Michael Bierut|Essays

How To Be Ugly

Whether reactionary spasm or irrevocable paradigm shift, the new trend is making design that looks ugly. The trick is to surround it with enough attitude so it will be properly perceived not as the product of everyday incompetence, but …

Michael Bierut|Essays

DéjÁ Vu All Over Again

From Fifty Years of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, published over 40 years ago in 1966. Eerie.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Rest in Peace, Herbert Muschamp

Officially published for the first time as a posthumous tribute: a loving parody of the writing of the late, great architectural critic Herbert Muschamp.

Michael Bierut|Essays

May I Show You My Portfolio?

My art school portfolio has sat in a box, largely untouched, in the closets and basements of the three places I've lived in the last 27 years, sort of like a slowly decaying design time capsule. A few weeks ago, I opened it up for the …

Michael Bierut|Essays

You're So Intelligent

Wanting to be taken seriously, designers yearn to be respected for their minds. Yet they take their real gifts — a miraculous fluency with beauty, an ability to manipulate form in a way that can touch people's hearts — for …

Michael Bierut|Slideshows

Flat, Simple and Funny: The World of Charley Harper

Charley Harper, "Mystery of the Missing Migrants," from Beguiled by the Wild: The Art of Charley Harper, Flower Valley Press, 1994A few years ago, we bought a little house at the southernmost tip of the Jersey Shore in a town called Cape …