How to | Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand, Debbie Millman, Chee Pearlman | Design and Style Series Event

FREE - Auditorium doors open at 5:30 p.m.

Logos, packages, signs, books, websites: in the modern world we are surrounded by graphic design. Where does it come from? Why does it look that way? What is it supposed to do? Michael Bierut is a partner in the New York office of the international design consultancy Pentagram. A native of Ohio, Bierut began his career with the legendary designer Massimo Vignelli and has won highest honors from AIGA, the Art Directors Club, and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. For over thirty-five years of practice he has worked for every kind of client imaginable, from professional football teams to academic research laboratories.

His new book, How To, was called “incisive and engaging” by The New York Times Book Review. In conversation with Jessica Helfand, Debbie Millman and Chee Pearlman, Bierut talks about his work and how graphic design effects all our lives.

The first monograph, design manual, and manifesto by Michael Bierut, one of the world’s most renowned graphic designers—a career retrospective that showcases more than thirty-five of his most noteworthy projects for clients as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Yale School of Architecture, The New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue, and the Morgan Library, and reflects eclectic enthusiasm and accessibility that has been the hallmark of his career. Michael Bierut has had one of the most varied and successful careers of any living graphic designer, serving a broad spectrum of clients.

How to is a landmark work in the field featuring more than thirty-five of his projects. It reveals his philosophy of graphic design—how to use it to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry, and (every once in a while) change the world. Specially chosen to illustrate the breadth and reach of graphic design today, each entry demonstrates Bierut’s eclectic approach. In his entertaining voice, the artist walks us through each from start to finish, mixing historic images, preliminary drawings (including full-size reproductions of the notebooks he has maintained for more than thirty-five years), working models and rejected alternatives, as well as the finished work. Throughout, he provides insights into the creative process, his working life, his relationship with clients, and the struggles that any design professional faces in bringing innovative ideas to the world.

Offering insight and inspiration for artists, designers, students, and anyone interested in how words, images, and ideas can be put together, the monograph How to provides insight to the design process of one of this century’s most renowned creative minds.

Copies of How to: Use graphic design to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry, and (every once in a while) change the world (Harper Collins, 2015) are available for purchase and signing at the end of event.

Michael Bierut studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, graduating summa cum laude in 1980. Prior to joining Pentagram in 1990 as a partner in the firm’s New York office, he worked for ten years at Vignelli Associates, ultimately as vice president of graphic design. His clients at Pentagram have included The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Harley-Davidson, The Museum of Arts and Design, the New York City Department of Transportation, the Robin Hood Foundation, Mohawk Paper Mills, New World Symphony, Princeton University, the New York Jets, and MIT Media Lab. He has won hundreds of design awards and his work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Montreal. He served as president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1988 to 1990 and is president emeritus of AIGA National. He also serves on the boards of the Architectural League of New York and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Michael was elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 1989, to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 2003, and was awarded the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in 2006. In 2008, he was named winner in the Design Mind category of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards. Michael is a senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art. He writes frequently about design and is the co-editor of the five-volume series Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design published by Allworth Press. In 2002, Michael Bierut co-founded Design Observer, a blog of design and cultural criticism: today, the site is the largest design publication in the world with over a million site visits a month. Michael’s book 79 Short Essays on Design was published in 2007 by Princeton Architectural Press. 

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is Senior Critic at Yale School of Art, Lecturer in Design and Management at the Yale School of Management, and Artist in Residence at Yale’s Institute for Network Science. Named the first Henry Wolf Resident in design at the American Academy in Rome in 2010, she is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal. Her new book is Design: The Invention of Desire from Yale University Press.

Debbie Millman is a designer, author, educator and strategist. She is President of the design division at Sterling Brands, where she has worked on the redesign of over 200 global brands, including projects with P&G, Colgate, Nestle, Kraft and Pepsi. Debbie is also Co-Founder and Chair of the world’s first Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She is President Emeritus of AIGA, the largest professional association for design in the world and a contributing editor at Print Magazine. In 2005, she began hosting, “Design Matters,” the first podcast about design on the Internet. In 2011, the show was awarded a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award. She is the author of six books on design and branding including two collections of interviews that have extended the ethos and editorial vision of Design Matters to the printed page: How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer and Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits. Both books have been published in over 10 languages. Her visual essays have been on display at the Chicago Design Museum and Anderson University in South Carolina. 

Chee Pearlman produces international conferences, exhibitions, and editorial content about design issues. The former editor of I.D. Magazine, she has written for The New York Times, Newsweek, and Wired. Conferences she has organized include “Stories From the Source,” on design as storytelling; “Serious Play” on the force of play in design; and “Radical Craft,” on the power of thinking with your hands. She founded the Chrysler Design Awards and is an advisor to the TED Prize and the Curry Stone Design Prize. She is the curator of the exhibition Issac Mizrahi: An Unruly History currently on view at the Jewish Museum, and author of the accompanying catalogue.

Conceived and organized by Arezoo Moseni and in its fifth year, Design and Style is a series of events featuring discussions and presentations by leading professionals in the various design fields.

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