Latest Michael Bierut Quotes from Interviews

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• 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.

  Michael Bierut

  Ohio, Guy, Together

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• 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.

  Michael Bierut

  Rome, Long, Track

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• 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.

  Michael Bierut

  Ingredients, Want, Dishes

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

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

  Michael Bierut

  Ingredients, Typefaces

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

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

  Michael Bierut

  Writing, Ideas, Design

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• 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.

  Michael Bierut

  College, Thinking, Design

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• If you can announce the Higgs Boson in Comic Sans, clearly anybody can do anything.

  Michael Bierut

  Comic, Comic Sans, Can Do

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• The scientists at CERN were actually surprised that people commented on this. Reportedly Fabiola Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs Boson, was asked why she had selected Comic Sans. She simply said, "Because I like it."

  Michael Bierut

  People, Scientist, Comic

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• It's hard to predict what will happen as reading on screen becomes more of a universal norm, and when the formats dictated by social media - Twitter's 140-character limit, for instance - start to influence what we're used to.

  Michael Bierut

  Reading, Character, Media

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• I believe sans serif typefaces - today upheld as models of neutrality and legibility - were called "Grotesques" in the 19th century because people thought they were hideous. But now we're used to them.

  Michael Bierut

  Believe, People, Neutrality

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• We get used to things, and we like reading the way we're used to reading.

  Michael Bierut

  Reading, Way, Used

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• The studies I've seen about readability and legibility tend to focus on a specific set of metrics: size, not just the point size, but things like the size of the lower case letters as a proportion of the overall letter height, and line length. People simply can't read really small type set in really long lines.

  Michael Bierut

  Long, People, Focus

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• A simple MS Word document, or a Powerpoint presentation, has its limits, particularly the unpredictability in how the page will actually display. With a PDF, you are locking down all those variables.

  Michael Bierut

  Simple, Pages, Limits

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• We use the word typography to describe two different things: the design of letterforms, and the layout of typeset passages on a page. Both of those experiences are really important to communicating information, especially when that information involves complex ideas.

  Michael Bierut

  Ideas, Two, Design

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• For instance, I assume those "carrots" we have on our keyboards were there originally to express "greater than" and "less than." Then they were adopted by coders, and now they show up all the time in the way email addresses are constructed. At least I think that's what happened.

  Michael Bierut

  Thinking, Addresses, Keyboards

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• I think once the artistic world of the type designer merged with the scientific world of the computer programmer, you began to see this crossover.

  Michael Bierut

  Thinking, World, Computer

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• The design of the notorious Palm Beach County "butterfly ballot" in the 2000 Presidential election is certainly one of them. But I would say most of the time this is less about a conscious attempt to manipulate an outcome, and more about pure ineptitude.

  Michael Bierut

  Beach, Butterfly, Presidential

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• Certain kinds of typeface design and typographic design are designed to persuade: we can make this company look modern if we use a crisp sans serif typeface, or we can make this restaurant look like its been around forever if we use typefaces and layout styles that have been around forever too. But there are other categories, and ballot design is one of them, where the goal should be to be purely functional. There have been notable failures in this category.

  Michael Bierut

  Goal, Forever, Design

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• There was a time when most people had a choice between two kinds of personal communication, handwriting or using a typewriter. Today, people are invited to choose from a list of (surprisingly exotic) typefaces every time they turn on their computer. I think this has made everyone more aware of the idea that picking a typeface is a conscious choice.

  Michael Bierut

  Communication, Thinking, Typewriters

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• I'm not an expert in typefaces that serve scientific writing, but I'd guess that's another dozen or two.

  Michael Bierut

  Writing, Two, Experts

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• Most people have no idea how much goes into designing a typeface. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet, usually with two versions of each, upper and lower case. Punctuation and alternate characters and numbers - let's not forget numbers - can add another 40 or so.

  Michael Bierut

  Character, Ideas, Two

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

• People in the UK will say that the design community in the US is much more coherent than other countries. It has no government support at all, so it's really like a grass roots thing.

  Michael Bierut

  Country, Government, Roots

  Source: facingsideways.com

• Australia seems to strike a balance between big and small. It's big enough to have that diversity, but not so big that it disintegrates into something that is not connected.

  Michael Bierut

  Australia, Diversity, Balance

  Source: facingsideways.com

• In the US you have New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Miami and dozens of other cities; a few of them have a really strong visual character. But even with those there is just too much space between them and too many people.

  Michael Bierut

  Strong, New York, Character

  Source: facingsideways.com

• I have a really shallow idea about what Australia is.

  Michael Bierut

  Ideas, Australia, Shallow

  Source: facingsideways.com