All That Jazz: Posters by Niklaus Troxler

Speech, Speech

Does this sound familiar?

Your client has a message to communicate: an argument, a sales pitch, a call to action. Your job is to give it form. You're an expert at this. You know how to take a complicated bunch of ideas and reduce them to their arresting, memorable, engaging essence...

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The It Factor

Cover, Quintessence, designed by John Jay, photographs by Dan Kozan, 1983

Imagine your son waking up on Christmas morning and rushing to open his presents in breathless anticipation of getting a shiny new iPod, only to find out he's got a Zune, which is like coming second in chess.

When I read this on David Galbraith's blog a few weeks ago, I had a moment of deja vu. More than twenty years ago, I heard an author describing an identical experience, except it he was talking about a little boy who was hoping for a real baseball bat; his clueless parents got him a perfectly good non-Louisville Slugger instead.

You know it when you see it. There's the iPod, and there are all those other MP3 players; there's the Louisville Slugger, and there are all those other baseball bats...

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Michael Bierut studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati, and has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram since 1990. Michael is a Senior Critic in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art.

Recent Video

Designing, Writing, Teaching: Not My Real Job

Michael Bierut gives an outline of his life and work: a video for a D-Crit lecture at SVA in NYC.

Recent Book

Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design
Michael Bierut
Princeton Architectural Press, 2007
Buy This Book >>

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