Michael Bierut

Michael Bierut|Essays

Four Years After

After four years of ambiguity and contention and the World Trade Center site, Ellsworth Kelly's 2003 proposal seems wiser than ever.

Michael Bierut|Essays

You May Already Be a Winner

Are graphic design competitions worthwhile?

Michael Bierut|Essays

Every New Yorker is a Target

The latest New Yorker magazine has only one advertiser: Target. The effect is disorienting.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Credit Line Goes Here

Design is essentially a collaborative enterprise. That makes assigning credit for the products of our work a complicated issue.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Rick Valicenti: This Time It's Personal

In his newly-published monograph Emotion as Promotion: A Book of Thirst, Rick Valicenti provides a glimpse into a designer's life that is at once accessibly seductive and brazenly idiosyncratic.

Michael Bierut|Essays

My Favorite Book is Not About Design (or Is It?)

Act One, the autobiography of playwright and director Moss Hart, is the best, funniest, and most inspiring description of the creative process ever put down on paper.

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Obvious, Shunned by So Many, Is Successfully Avoided Once Again

Does anyone devote as much energy to avoiding simple, sensible solutions as the modern graphic designer? Publications of designers' own work demonstrate what effort they go through to needlessly complicate what might be simple solutions.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Call Me Shithead, or, What's in a Name?

Everyone has experience with naming, whether a baby or even a goldfish. The fact that it's so easy is what makes it so hard. The biggest problem, of course, is that new names seldom sound good at first.

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Man Who Saved Jackson Pollock

Herbert Matter, the designer who stored away a cache of recently-discovered Jackson Pollock paintings, deserves a similar rediscovery.

Michael Bierut|Essays

On (Design) Bullshit

In Concert of Wills, the fascinating 1997 documentary on the building of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, architect Richard Meier is beset on all sides by critics and carpers: homeowners who don't want the Center's white buildings ruining …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Me and My Pyramid

The redesign of the United States Department of Agriculture's Food Pyramid is neither satisfying nor nourishing from an information design point of view.

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Supersized, Temporarily Impossible World of Bruce McCall

Illustrator Bruce McCall's vision of an exhuberant, overscale America is evoked by the opening of a new McDonald's in Chicago.