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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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Michael Bierut
Age: 54
Designer
Graphic Designer
Cleveland
Ohio
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More quotes by 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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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.
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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Simplicity, wit, and good typography.
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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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I'm not sure about my design work every time.
Michael Bierut
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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.
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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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.
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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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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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.
Michael Bierut
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I've never really acquired any facility for working on the computer, though one day I think I would like to. My generation just barely missed it, which I don't think is a good thing or a bad thing.
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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No one loves authenticity like a graphic designer. And no one is quite as good at simulating it.
Michael Bierut
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We get used to things, and we like reading the way we're used to reading.
Michael Bierut
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The truth about logos is that they are not that hard to do.
Michael Bierut
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The problem contains the solution.
Michael Bierut
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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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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