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If typography is calling attention to itself, it's taking that attention away from what the words are saying.

Michael Bierut

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Michael Bierut
Age: 54
Designer
Graphic Designer
Cleveland
Ohio
Consciousness
Saying
Attention
Words
Away
Typography
Calling
Taking

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The problem contains the solution.
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Australia is one of the few places that I can think of where the cities, at least those I've been to, seem to have strikingly different characters and visual textures. To an American like me, there's basically Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane and the rest is all bush.
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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.
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I had a lot of enthusiasms that were very contradictory, I was never very doctrinaire in the type of design I wanted to do.
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The truth about logos is that they are not that hard to do.
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Good typography, first, makes words readable. At its best, it does something more: it helps express the animating spirit of the ideas behind the words.
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I'm not sure about my design work every time.
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Target for example, is just a dot with a circle around it, that's all it is, so if you want a logo like Target, you don't need to hire a designer, you barely need to know how to operate a computer program, the logo may as well be anything.
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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.
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We use the word typography to describe two different things: the design of letterforms, and the layout of typeset passages on a page. Both of those experiences are really important to communicating information, especially when that information involves complex ideas.
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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.
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Most processes leave out the stuff no one wants to talk about: magic, intuition and leaps of faith.
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Every little job counts. Design counts.
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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.
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Designs that have a whiff of complex impenetrability tends to suggest big, complicated ideas. Academic writing tends to work the same way, I understand.
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No one loves authenticity like a graphic designer. And no one is quite as good at simulating it.
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Australia seems to strike a balance between big and small. It's big enough to have that diversity, but not so big that it disintegrates into something that is not connected.
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We get used to things, and we like reading the way we're used to reading.
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There was a time when most people had a choice between two kinds of personal communication, handwriting or using a typewriter. Today, people are invited to choose from a list of (surprisingly exotic) typefaces every time they turn on their computer. I think this has made everyone more aware of the idea that picking a typeface is a conscious choice.
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The scientists at CERN were actually surprised that people commented on this. Reportedly Fabiola Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs Boson, was asked why she had selected Comic Sans. She simply said, Because I like it.
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