Quotes from Michael Bierut

I can see how some people get sentimental about how we used to do things in 'the good old days' but in a way I just think they are being nostalgic for the way they were brought up.

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.

If you look at the Olympic graphics for Mexico or Los Angeles, those programs don't look contemporary by today's eyes but they really look like they are of their place and time.

A good cook can make something amazing out of even the blandest ingredients. Still, you don't want to eat the exact same dish every day.

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.

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.

Designs that have a whiff of complex impenetrability tends to suggest big, complicated ideas. Academic writing tends to work the same way, I understand.

I think once the artistic world of the type designer merged with the scientific world of the computer programmer, you began to see this crossover.

I've never really acquired any facility for working on the computer, though one day I think I would like to. My generation just barely missed it, which I don't think is a good thing or a bad thing.

Simplicity, wit, and good typography.

Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.

Every little job counts. Design counts.

I had a lot of enthusiasms that were very contradictory, I was never very doctrinaire in the type of design I wanted to do.

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.

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?

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.

Most processes leave out the stuff no one wants to talk about: magic, intuition and leaps of faith.

the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else.

designers actually can change the world for the better by making the complicated simple and finding beauty in truth.

the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be.

use design as a secret disguise to infiltrate whatever world you want to go into. If you do that over and over again, and then translate that interest and curiosity into the work that you're doing, you'll do great.

And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be.

And I was reminded of something I learned from another mentor, my first boss after I graduated, Massimo Vignelli, who once described the difference between complication and complexity. A love affair that's complex is wonderful, he said, but a love affair thats complicated is a disaster.