Michael Bierut / Pentagram

New York

Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram’s New York office, has produced acclaimed work for clients including United Airlines, the Walt Disney Company, the New York Times, Motorola, and Saks Fifth Avenue. A founding writer of the widely read Design Observer blog, he is a member of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and in 2008 received the National Design Award for “Design Mind.”

MICHAEL BIERUT IS one of the graphic design world’s most prolific figures. He has won hundreds of awards at both Vignelli Associates and Pentagram, where he has been a partner since 1990, and is responsible for many examples of celebrated and recognizable graphic design. As a recent profile of Bierut by design writer Alissa Walker put it, he “has built his career on making himself, his work, his personality, his opinions, available.”

Bierut has also made prolific use of sketchbooks, filling some 80 books since 1982. A fascinating secret history of a highly visible career, Bierut sees these books—all a uniform size, all with unlined paper—more as evidence of compulsive behavior, akin to his three-mile run each morning and the highly regulated charts that detail his progress. “I take my current notebook with me to every meeting, even if I never open it. Each one works like a security blanket for me.” Despite his admitted obsessive tendencies, Beirut’s books are not buttoned up. “My books are messy. It’s funny; I’m a fairly messy designer. It doesn’t show in my work, but my process is messy. Sometimes someone will ask, ‘Oh, we’re doing a piece about process. Can you show us your design process?’ And I know exactly what they want. They want this sequence of rough sketches leading to almost-rough sketches leading to almost-finished work leading to the final, chosen piece. I don’t have those things; I don’t work in a sort of methodical way.¹⁰

“Occasionally I’ll run into someone whose name is familiar. In those cases, with alarming accuracy, I can go back to a notebook and pull out my notes from a meeting I may have had with them ten years ago. Nostalgia is too sentimental a term, but the notebooks definitely are memory aids.”

—Michael Bierut

“I don’t even consider what I do in these books sketching. It’s more like note-taking. Sometimes the notes take the form of drawings or diagrams rather than words. I don’t valorize drawing, and I really don’t care if my designers sketch before they go to the computer. As long as they think before they go to the computer, I’m happy. Everyone has his or her own way of doing their thinking. These notebooks work for me. Besides”, Bierut adds, “I’ve never learned how to design on a computer. A pen and a notebook are the only design tools I really know how to use with any confidence.”

Museum of Art & Design Identity

“The symbol is built out of circles and squares, a reference to the fact that this squarish building sits on one of the most prominent circles in New York City. The forms also refer in a subtle way to the building’s distinctive, some would say notorious, lollipop columns, which are visible through the new façade.”

—Michael Bierut