Home / Quotes / Quote by Michael Bierut

Quote by Michael Bierut

“I actually think it almost works the other way sometimes: making a college textbook, say, look really "user friendly" tends to also make it look less "serious," even if nothing changes other than the design treatment.”

Quote by Michael Bierut

Author

Michael Bierut, born in 1957, is an accomplished graphic designer from the United States. His work spans a wide range of fields, from brand identity to book design, and is renowned for its unique style and creativity. more

You May Also Like

“Designs that have a whiff of complex impenetrability tends to suggest big, complicated ideas. Academic writing tends to work the same way, I understand.”

Way Writing Ideas Bigs Design Complexes Complicated Academic Academic Writing

Author:Michael Bierut

“It's a cliché, but typefaces are really just ingredients.”

Ingredients Typefaces

Author:Michael Bierut

“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.”

Want Stills Cooks Ingredients Dishes Good Cook

Author:Michael Bierut

“It was stone carvers in ancient Rome, scribes in the Middle Ages, all the way through Gutenberg to the present day. That's a pretty long track record. More likely we may reach a point where each one of us is a typographer with our own custom proprietary typeface.”

Way May Long Age Records Middle Stones Ancient Track Customs Rome Middle Ages Present Day Track Record Ancient Rome Scribes Typefaces Carver Gutenberg

Author:Michael Bierut

“I grew up in a Cleveland suburb called Parma, Ohio. Somewhere along the way I fell in love with a typeface called Bodoni. It turns out that Giambattista Bodoni had his foundry in Parma, Italy. So I pick Bodoni because us guys from Parma have to stick together.”

Way Together Guy Turns Grew Grew Up Picks Sticks Suburbs Ohio Cleveland Typefaces

Author:Michael Bierut

“I was extremely frustrated, almost at the point of giving up on coming up with a name for the project (because I'm awful at it), when I decided to play the 'put a pen somewhere on a map with your eyes closed' game with South Africa. About the 5th try was St. Lucia in South Africa, which coincidentally also happens to be an idyllic sub-tropical seaside resort town. The name seemed to fit with the mood of the music, and so after a while it just stuck.”

Giving Trying Play Happens Eye Games Names Fit Giving Up Projects Decided Towns South Stuck Mood Awful Maps Pens South Africa Frustrated Resorts Tropical Idyllic

Author:St. Lucia

“My family still lives over there [ in South Africa] .I miss them terribly. I would say that most of my life over there was probably very similar to the sort of life someone would experience growing up somewhere like Australia or in the US.”

Stills Growing Up Growing Missing My Family South Australia South Africa Still Life

Author:St. Lucia

“We lived in a suburb in Johannesburg, which is a massive city of about 8 million people, and my parents would drive me to school every day and over the weekend I would go to the mall and then occasionally on Safari. Pretty normal stuff, apart from the Safari.”

People School Stuff Parent Cities Millions Normal Massive Weekend Suburbs Malls Safari Johannesburg

Author:St. Lucia

“When I was 10 I went to the Drakensberg Boys Choir School, which is this idyllic Harry Potter-esque music boarding school in the mountains in South Africa, and that's when everything started to change for me and I realised that music is my thing.”

School Boys Mountain Music Is South South Africa Harry Potter Potters Realised Choir Idyllic

Author:St. Lucia

“Of course I had the parallel of having the early years of my life being spent during apartheid, and then having a lot of awful poverty going on around me while I lived in this bubble of middle-classness, but I was a child, and I only really started to (I hope) understand all of that fairly recently.”

Years Children Courses Poverty Middle Awful Bubbles Parallels Apartheid

Author:St. Lucia