So I took another trip to New York in February, and as is my want, I visited a couple of designers and talked design. Prominently on my list for this trip was a visit to Pentagram’s New York office and in particular, to speak to one of my design heroes, Michael Bierut. Michael has built his career on making himself, his work, his personality, his opinions, available and in the process has become one of the best known and most well regarded designers in the world. I’m not usually too nervous when I visit the offices of other designers, we’re all just folks in the same profession after all, but I have to admit the Pentagram offices are fairly imposing and hold under their roof some of the most well know designers in the city (something that struck home as I sat on their waiting room couch as I watched Paula Scher walk past, while Abbott Miller and Luke Hayman worked away at their desks in the short distance). Michael was very generous with his time and his opinions while I fumbled through my questions, the following is a transcript of our discussion back in February.

Chris Bowden: A couple of years ago you put your graduate portfolio up on Design Observer and discussed it. It’s been a pretty popular piece on the site and an interesting examination of the process of putting together your first folio. What are some of your impressions of starting out in graphic design from back then?

Michael Bierut: I don’t think that my portfolio was very typical at the time. It had some very anomalous aspects to it, partly because I was enthusiastic about graphic design in 1974. Compared with now when almost everyone knows what graphic design is and has some sort of access to the tools to make it, back then, it was really esoteric, you had to quantify it as being ‘like commercial art’, as one still does in certain circles. It was a strange thing to want to do for a living. I had a lot of enthusiasms that were very contradictory, I was never very doctrinaire in the type of design I wanted to do.

Read the rest of this interview covering crowdsourcing, reviving old identities, the value of logos and more in this interview with Pentagram partner Michael Bierut visit | Facing Sideways

This post was submitted by Chris Bowden.

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