Now You See It Michael Bierut

Like having your very own design mentor in book form, Now You See It is full of the down to earth real stories from being on the forefront of Graphic Design.

The brand identity work that Michael Bierut has created over the last 3 decades is some of the most consistently strong, eschewing trends and fads, he continues to exhibit conceptual thinking, strong typography and of course, amazing ideas. He has always been very good about sharing and discussing his work (see my previous interview!) and also being a prolific writer on his thinking and experiences about design. Now You See It and Other Essays on Design is collection of his writings for the Design Observer website.

Michael Bierut has historically always had something intelligent to say and share whether giving a talk, an online interview or in his own writings, so it is fitting that he exercises his gifts of design thinking and storytelling in constructive fashion.

As I said in my intro, it’s like having a mentor in a book, it is full of satisfying stories about his own experiences explaining and controlling the design process with clients, design lessons he has learned along the way, and pop culture asides, such as his discussion on the power of the TV series Mad Men.

His writing can be full of incredible depth, from the vulnerable to the inspired, but always tinged by a humble (and sometimes laugh out loud hilarious) nature. There’s some wonderful stories of design history he shares, from discussing how the great Lou Dorfsman only designed one way (with integrity of course), to a tale of his first freelance gig where his wife Dorothy has to bail him out on what the word “quintessence” means.

The last chapter of the book may be the best, it contains an interview with Michael Beirut where he sums up his personal view on Graphic Design “…what I discovered was that design—and this is particularly true with graphic design—is a way to engage with real content, real experience. The key to the whole thing is your ability to learn about that stuff—what I called the ‘outside world’ stuff—and if you can do that, your work will resonate in a way that it can’t if your goal is simply resolving the formal ‘design’ issues.”

Never were truer words spoken!