Why Design Matters: Michael Bierut

Michael Bierut is a graphic designer and partner at Pentagram, where his clients have included the New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue, MIT Media Lab, Billboard Magazine, and Princeton University. He has won hundreds of awards for his work, including a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award and an AIGA medal, the profession’s highest honor. He is president emeritus of AIGA National, and his work is in museum collections nationwide. Since the mid-1990s, Bierut has been senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art and a senior faculty fellow at Yale School of Management. He is co-founder of Design Observer—the largest design publication in the world—and co-hosts The Observatory and The Design of Business | The Business of Design podcasts. His newest book, Now You See It and Other Essays on Design was published last fall. Bierut graduated summa cum laude from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning in 1980, and before joining Pentagram he worked for ten years at Vignelli Associates.