Michael Bierut has been a graphic designer for nearly fifty years. After graduating with highest honors from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning in 1980, his first job was in the office of Lella and Massimo Vignelli. He worked there for a decade, ultimately as Vice President for Graphic Design.
In 1990, he became a partner in the New York office of Pentagram. His clients have ranged from Mastercard, Slack, Verizon, Benetton and Disney, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Poetry Foundation, MIT Media Lab, Saks Fifth Avenue and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. As a volunteer to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, he designed the “H” logo that became ubiquitous during her presidential run, and the monumental typographic inscription he created for the Obama Presidential Center will crown the complex’s central tower. Beginning in October 2024, he assumed an advisory role at Pentagram, serving as consultant to his partners on selected projects and overall business strategy.
Michael was elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 1989, installed in the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 2003, and awarded the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in 2006. In 2008, he was named winner in the Design Mind category of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards. In 2016, he was the Henry Wolf Resident in Graphic Design at the American Academy in Rome. He has been lecturer at the Yale School of Management and senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art. For the latter class, he created the “100 Days Project,” an exercise involving the daily repetition of a single creative act which is now practiced worldwide. His appearance in the 2007 documentary Helvetica (“Any questions? Of course not!”) is considered by many the movie’s funniest moment.
Michael is co-editor of the five-volume series Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design and co-founded Design Observer, an online site for design and cultural criticism. His books, which include 79 Short Essays on Design (2007), How to use graphic design to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry and (every once in a while) change the world (2015 and 2021) and Now You See It and Other Essays on Design (2017), have been translated into German, French, Korean, Chinese, Polish and Russian.
