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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.

Michael Bierut

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Michael Bierut
Age: 54
Designer
Graphic Designer
Cleveland
Ohio
Something
Helping
Animating
Good
Makes
Readable
Spirit
Typography
Doe
Helps
Best
Express
Ideas
Behinds
Firsts
Behind
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I'm not sure about my design work every time.
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If you ask people in the US what logos they like and recognise, they'll name Target or Nike.
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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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Australia has always put out some good design, particularly environmental graphics. I associate that with Australia, more so that a lot of other places. Whether that has anything to do with the landscape, who knows?
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Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.
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I can see how some people get sentimental about how we used to do things in 'the good old days' but in a way I just think they are being nostalgic for the way they were brought up.
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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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Every little job counts. Design counts.
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I think that you could design a terrible logo for a good company with great people and they could build it into a great program. Alternatively you could design what seems to be a brilliant logo for people who are not smart or energetic or are incapable of associating with anything positive and it would become a terrible logo.
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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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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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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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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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No one loves authenticity like a graphic designer. And no one is quite as good at simulating it.
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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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The studies I've seen about readability and legibility tend to focus on a specific set of metrics: size, not just the point size, but things like the size of the lower case letters as a proportion of the overall letter height, and line length. People simply can't read really small type set in really long lines.
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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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If typography is calling attention to itself, it's taking that attention away from what the words are saying.
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