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What it argues
How to is Michael Bierut's account of thirty-five years of practice as a graphic designer at Pentagram, the world's largest independent design firm. The book is organized around thirty-five projects — one per year of practice — and each chapter tells the story of a single job: the brief, the process, the unexpected turns, and what Bierut took from it. The projects range from museum identity systems and political campaigns to corporate rebrands and book covers.
Bierut is a clear writer and an honest one. The chapters are not arranged to show a designer who always knew the right answer. Several projects failed, or landed differently than intended, or were hijacked by client decisions that changed what had been a good idea into a compromised one. The chapter on the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign logo — Bierut designed it — is one of the best accounts of what it is actually like to design something that millions of people have strong opinions about, and to watch it enter a discourse the designer cannot control.
What it gets right
- 1.
Graphic design is always in service of something else — a client, a cause, a message. Caring genuinely about that content tends to produce better form than treating every project as a purely aesthetic exercise.
- 2.
Constraint is a productive condition, not an obstacle. Many of Bierut's strongest projects emerged from tight budgets, difficult clients, or conflicting requirements.
- 3.
The designer cannot control how work is received. The Hillary Clinton logo chapter shows that a well-reasoned design decision can be swept away in a cultural context the designer neither anticipated nor caused.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Michael Bierut is a graphic designer and partner at Pentagram, the international design firm, where he has worked since 1990. Before Pentagram he spent ten years at Vignelli Associates. His clients have included the New York Times, Yale University, the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign. He is a senior critic at the Yale School of Art and Design and a past president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. His previous book, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, is considered a standard text in design education.
