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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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Michael Bierut
Age: 54
Designer
Graphic Designer
Cleveland
Ohio
Two
Communicate
Typography
Ideas
Experiences
Communicating
Important
Pages
Passages
Different
Especially
Involves
Really
Design
Describe
Things
Information
Complexes
Word
Page
Use
Complex
Layout

More quotes by 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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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?
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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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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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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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The truth about logos is that they are not that hard to do.
Michael Bierut
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Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.
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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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 problem contains the solution.
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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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.
Michael Bierut
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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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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