Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1957 he atteneded The University of Cincinnati's College of Design. There he studied graphic design, which was not very popular at this time. In June of 1980 Michael graduated and started searching for a job. He Went to Vignelli Associates for an interview and soon enough they offered him a job. There he spent the first 10 years of his career. He started his work with graphics but soon found a love for typography. He is now the president of the New York chapter of AIGA. He has had many famous clients like; Walt Disney, United Airlines, Motorola, the New York Jets, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and The New York Times, to name a few. He has a few sayings that i think are really important to his work;
- "Part of maturing as a designer is discovering what you're good at."
- "Not everything is design. But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything."
- "Graphic design is the purposeful combination of words, pictures and other visual elements to support the communication of an explicit or implicit message."
Here is my research and the sites i found them on. I am very excited to make a website for him, but i am very nervous because all of his work is very elegant, beautiful and amazing, and i hope i can make it reflect him, his work and his personality.
· Bierut has built his career on making himself, his work, his personality, his opinions, available. It has worked to great effect. He graciously jets to speaking engagements tucked into tiny towns in corners of the country. He makes a point to advise design students. But this should be of no surprise. After all, Michael Bierut is a Midwestern-raised, impeccably-mannered person-who happens to be one of the most famous graphic designers today
· Bierut was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1957. Graphic design as a career aspiration was not heavily promoted to the young adults of Ohio at the time. Yet his loves of fine art, music and drawing—all converging, to him, in the form of album covers
· study graphic design at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design
· In 1980 Bierut landed his first job at one of the most important design firms in the world, working for Massimo and Lella Vignelli in New York City. Working alongside legends for 10 years at Vignelli Associates, eventually as vice president of design, gave Bierut serious industry clout. But it also instilled a keystone tenet of his career. “Probably the most interesting thing I learned is that a lot of the things about design that tend to get designers really interested aren't that important,”
· Bierut strives to not only make things that people are able to read, he makes people want to read them. “He has a quality that I have much respect for in the kind of work that we do,” says Pullman. “He's a person who's very easy to understand, both when you talk to him and when he's doing his work. He's accessible, humane, funny when it's appropriate, and witty almost all of the time. And that's a very important quality for someone who wants to be a communicator.”
· It is this “democratization of design” that Bierut has championed while a partner at Pentagram, where he's been since 1990; the act of making things digestible is where he excels.
· His list of clients consists of massive corporations that need to be embraced by the masses: Walt Disney, United Airlines, Motorola, the New York Jets, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
· Or he lends a voice to complex, intellectual entities that need emotional authenticity: Yale and Princeton Universities, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York magazine. This aesthetic also informs his work as an author, co-editing the design essay series of Looking Closer and co-writing and designing the monograph Tibor Kalman, Perverse Optimist.
· Like Kalman, Bierut has not only made a profound mark on design, but embedded himself in the cultural concrete of New York City. Bierut is a director of the Architectural League of New York and a member of New Yorkers for Parks. He created wayfinding signage for the Alliance for Downtown New York, assisting millions of tourists navigating the streets of Lower Manhattan. Bierut's pieces can be seen at two New York museums, the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, and more around the world. It was also in New York that he became involved with AIGA, initially drawn into the fold when asked to DJ chapter events. Bierut was president of AIGA's AIGA's New York chapter from 1988 to 1990 and president of AIGA from 1998 to 2001; he has since been named to the Art Directors Hall of Fame and the Alliance Graphique Internationale.
· But it is as a “design observer,” more specifically as a founder of the online design journal Design Observer, which has garnered him a different kind of design audience
· He seamlessly, coherently, weaves references from Pulp Fiction to Napoleon Dynamite into the very fabric of design debate, somehow making the whole thing more relevant, more accessible—more fun.
· “Michael has a brain that is a giant compendium,” Scher says. “He absorbs and retains everything and pulls it out at the appropriate moment and uses it to its maximal effect. Mention a movie and he quotes from it, maybe he enacts a little scene. Mention a book and he recites a passage and relates it to three other books that have the same spirit, that you haven't read, but you will now. Mention a designer or architect and he knows the most recent project they've completed and their first project, how they've changed, how they haven't, who influenced them, who they influence, and he sometimes will make a little sketch or diagram of their work. There isn't a day that goes by when I haven't asked Michael what he knows about anything and what he thinks about everything. If knowledge is power, then Michael Bierut is the most powerful person in the entire design community.”
· “Not everything is design,” he writes. “But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything.”
· Since 1990 he has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram.
· He has won hundreds of design awards and his work is represented in several permanent collections including: the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the Denver Art Museum; the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Germany; and the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, Switzerland."[2]
· Bierut served as the national president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1998 to 2001.
· Bierut is a senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art.
· Bierut is also the co-editor of three Looking Closer graphic design anthologies. He is also a founding writer of the Design Observer blog with Rick Poynor, William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand.[3]
· Bierut is also known for his involvement in the film Helvetica
- "Part of maturing as a designer is discovering what you're good at."
- "Not everything is design. But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything."
- "Graphic design is the purposeful combination of words, pictures and other visual elements to support the communication of an explicit or implicit message."
· Observers room- blogs done by Michael and projects he has done with students VERY COOL
· Lecture by Micheal about his 86 notebooks and some of his works.
· In the fall of 1979, prior to my last year of design school, on a trip to New York City, I went job hunting. I visited about six design firms. One of them, Vignelli Associates, eventually made me a job offer, and that's where I started my career one week after graduating from the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture and Art in June 1980. I didn't know it then, but that would be the last time I would look for a job.
o (his portfolio he took to vignelli)
HERE IS MY SKETCH FOR MY WEBSITE
HERE IS MY SKETCH FOR MY WEBSITE
