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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.

Michael Bierut

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Michael Bierut
Age: 54
Designer
Graphic Designer
Cleveland
Ohio
Design
Environment
Within
History
Anything
Operating
Going
Context
Always
Specific
Conscious

More quotes by Michael Bierut

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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.
Michael Bierut
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When it comes to working on identities, a lot of the time I find myself working with a company that has been around for a while. No matter what they say their goal is, the history and the impression that they have already made in the minds of the public is a real thing that you have to deal with.
Michael Bierut
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Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.
Michael Bierut
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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.
Michael Bierut
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No one loves authenticity like a graphic designer. And no one is quite as good at simulating it.
Michael Bierut
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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.
Michael Bierut
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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.
Michael Bierut
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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.
Michael Bierut
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For instance, I assume those carrots we have on our keyboards were there originally to express greater than and less than. Then they were adopted by coders, and now they show up all the time in the way email addresses are constructed. At least I think that's what happened.
Michael Bierut
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Most processes leave out the stuff no one wants to talk about: magic, intuition and leaps of faith.
Michael Bierut
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Every little job counts. Design counts.
Michael Bierut
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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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I had a lot of enthusiasms that were very contradictory, I was never very doctrinaire in the type of design I wanted to do.
Michael Bierut
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I'm not an expert in typefaces that serve scientific writing, but I'd guess that's another dozen or two.
Michael Bierut
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I've heard some designers talk about the design process being centred on invention, starting with a blank slate. I admire that and occasionally I'm capable of that, but I have to admit that I really have trouble working with completely open briefs.
Michael Bierut
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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.
Michael Bierut
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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.
Michael Bierut
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I'm not sure about my design work every time.
Michael Bierut
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I actually don't think that brand new logos are worth that much or mean that much in and of themselves. So why not have a class of third graders compete to design your logo?
Michael Bierut
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A good cook can make something amazing out of even the blandest ingredients. Still, you don't want to eat the exact same dish every day.
Michael Bierut