A Conversation with Michael Bierut

by Peter Merholz

August 7, 2006

Michael Bierut, partner at design firm Pentagram, took part in an email conversation with me. We published these in a series of blog posts, but now that it is complete, we felt it was good to bring it all together in a single piece.

This is not a quick read, but there’s a lot of meat in here that already has triggered responses across the blogosphere. Our discussion ranges from design to business to strategy to innovation to politics to practice.

Business, Strategy, and Design

Peter Merholz: One of the reasons we’re excited to have you speak at our User Experience Week event is because you’re willing to publicly challenge design orthodoxy. Two of your Design Observer posts stand out in this regard: “Innovation is the New Black” and “The Obvious, Shunned by So Many, Is Successfully Avoided Once Again.”

What has led you to take such stances that are not widely held? What experiences have shaped these design philosophies?

Michael Bierut: If it’s true, there may be several reasons. One is that my wife Dorothy isn’t a designer, she’s an MBA. We started dating when we were in high school in Ohio, and now we’ve been married for 26 years. Dorothy has always been the first to roll her eyes at some particularly choice design affectation, and she certainly won’t let me get away with any herself. I often find myself wondering what a “normal” person would think about my work. By normal I usually mean Dorothy.

All that said, I don’t really try to be argumentative or confrontational. I think there are a lot of ways to practice our craft, and almost all of them have some kind of merit. Some people have said that rather than challenging orthodoxy I’m more likely to be a defender of the status quo. It may be because, for designers at least, self-conscious difference for its own sake creates its own kind of orthodoxy.

PM: You mention that your wife has an MBA. As I’m sure you’re aware, there’s a lot of activity in the “business and design” space. The Institute of Design’s Strategy Conference took place last week, AIGA’s Gain conference is coming in October, BusinessWeek and CondeNast are planning “design and business” publications, business schools are preaching “design thinking” as a new way of solving old problems, et cetera et cetera.

In your practice, how do you bridge between “business” and “design”? In your client work, how do you demonstrate business impact?

MB: Too many designers enter the field spouting design jargon and, predictably, meet resistance or indifference from their clients. So they switch to business jargon, which is usually worse. I did this for a while, got good at it, and then got disgusted with myself.

I’ve come to believe strongly that one of the roles of design is to bring humanity, intelligence and beauty to the world of business, and indeed to everyday life. In my experience, good clients and good designers don’t see this goal as being opposed to-or even separate from-achieving business goals, but rather an integral part of it. It’s a dirty secret that much of what we admire in the design world is a byproduct not of “strategy” but of common sense, taste and luck. Some clients are too unnerved by ambiguity to accept this, and create garganuan superstructures of bullshit to provide a sense of security. Not only do designers enthusiastically collude in this process, but many have found ways to bill for it.

I measure success the same way anyone does: increased sales, better response rates, higher profit margins. At the same time, I’m painfully aware that design-especially graphic design-can only make a partial contribution to these outcomes, even at its most effective. This, of course, is useful to remember when the numbers don’t go your way.

PM: I agree that we have a responsibility to bring “humanity, intelligence and beauty” into these practices. But, and I’m going to beat this horse just a little bit longer, how do you hold yourself accountable? How do your clients hold you accountable? How do you justify (what I assume to be) your high rates? The top designers seem to command their position through the development of an aura of brilliance. Is cultivating an aura what it’s about?

Before you answer, I want to posit an assertion-from what I see, graphic design is becoming something of a commodity practice. Adaptive Path doesn’t promote graphic design services (though we offer them) because competing in that space means battling over ever-shrinking margins. Graphic design seems to have two huge forces working against its viability:

1. an immense supply-side, with so many designers offering virtually indistinguishable services, and
2. an almost allergic reaction to demonstrating explicit business value, so that pricing graphic design is something of a voodoo art.

MB: Peter, it’s funny when you talk about graphic design’s commodity-based supply-side, with so many designers offering the same services: that’s what many of my partners have said for years about web consulting.

Your questions combine issues that have to do with providing value to clients’ businesses, and running one’s own successful design business. To address the first question about accountability, I’d like to know the answer to that one myself. Has anyone ever proven, really proven, a connection between good design and a client’s business success? “Good design,” first of all, is hard to define: for instance, I find most of the examples of work in Design Management Journal pretty mundane. Second, I think you can argue that good design can make a good business even better, good design alone can’t make a bad company good. IBM and Enron didn’t succeed or fail because of their logos, both of which were designed by the same guy, by the way. So if a client asks me if I can prove that my work has had an effect on my clients’ bottom lines, I have a short answer: no.

Instead, I tell them that the best thing design can do for a company is to express that company’s personality accurately and compellingly, and in so doing permit that organization’s inherent strengths to prevail. This can be through graphics, product, environments, or experiences. The way Pentagram is set up creates a bias for this answer, of course. We’re owned by partners who are all working designers, and whose practices span the disciplines I mentioned above. The clients who hire us work directly with those partners: we have no account executives or client handlers. Each partner has a pretty distinct point of view and doesn’t attempt to conceal it. Our clients are people who want to work with smart, talented, committed designers who they like spending time with. Clients who don’t value that go elsewhere.

This is also a pretty efficient and stable model financially. Each partner runs a pretty small, autonomous team. The overhead is low. I write my own proposals and negotiate my own agreements. I can ask for whatever fees I want, but we basically try to cover our time and expenses plus a 20% profit margin. So much for the the voodoo art of pricing.

So it’s efficient and stable, yes. But I suspect it wouldn’t be of much interest to, say, an ad agency holding company. They would look for growth, which we really don’t care that much about. And they’d get exasperated by the idiosyncracies of the designer / owners, and try to replace them with people who could deliver a more reliable product with less muss and fuss. That’s what you mean by a commodity, right? I think we might make more money this way, but we’d give up what is a pretty ideal life in design.

Ethics, Politics, and Envisioning the Future

PM: Okay, I’m going to pick up a different thread here, though I think it’s related to your comment on an ideal life in design.

My colleague Dan Saffer has just finished writing a book on interaction design and the last chapter of his book concerns ethics. Many of us at Adaptive Path are admirers of Tibor Kalman, as well as the book you helped put together about him. What is your sense of the role ethics played in Kalman’s work? Was it explicit, or is it just that he couldn’t imagine how to work any other way? How do ethics inform your design work?

MB: One of the sad aspects of Tibor’s early death is that it puts other people in the unhappy position of having to speak for him, which I really can’t. Working on his book with him, I came to know Tibor as a person who, simply put, was uncomfortable being comfortable. His intuitive reaction to any status quo situation was first to disrupt it. This is an interesting characteristic to bring to the world of commercial graphic design, where you’re constantly being asked to accommodate yourself to your clients’ goals, very few of which will corresponded perfectly to your own. Tibor’s genius was that he didn’t attempt to separate his work and his life as working designers do. Ethics played a big part of that with Tibor, I guess, but it seemed to me to be a larger attempt to fully integrate your values as a person with your values as a designer. After his death, this has all boiled down to an image of “Saint Tibor” that I’m guessing he would have found pretty aggravating, to tell you the truth. He was more complicated, and more interesting, and just plain more fun than that.

I think that designers who are interested in ethics tend to focus on specific issues of dramatic conflict: Would you work for a cigarette company? is a favorite. That implies we can all pick and choose those special moments where we “have to be ethical.” I also sometimes hear that, for instance, design and politics don’t mix. Sure they mix. Everything mixes. The goal is to seek an integrated life, which is what I think Tibor did. You may be a designer with special expertise, and certainly that’s why a client would retain your advice. But try not to answer as a designer. Try to answer as a citizen, as a human being and as a designer.

It helps, of course, if you’re in a situation where you think you have a sense of agency, where you think you can walk away from situations that you don’t feel are right. And of course, you always do: the only question is what it takes for your to exercise it. My biggest failings as a designer is that I’m very polite, adverse to conflict and eager to please. As a result, as I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to get better at choosing my clients. I find that when I work for people whom I personally like and who are doing something that I admire or find interesting, I’m happier, the people I work with are happier, and we all do better work.

PM: You mention the mix of design and politics. A colleague of mine pointed me to your contribution for Partisan Project. Apart from some ethical stands (which, as you so pointedly demonstrated, mostly relate to the type of clients we would not take), we at Adaptive Path have been careful not to get too political with our design work, mostly out of respect of the array of viewpoints/prospectives within our organization.

How political a designer are you? I’m only familiar with the Partisan work-are there other examples out there of your political design? Have your politics ever made it… awkward in your client work? Also, what politically-oriented design work of late has most impressed you? What seems to be having an impact?

MB: During the Republican convention, Pentagram New York hung a NO BUSH banner outside our building, so I guess we don’t hesitate to take political positions as an office or as individuals. The Partisan Project image was, in fact, an earlier design for the banner that was rejected by my partners for being “too subtle.” Hmm!

I’ve found that any reluctance I’ve had to doing more of this “political design” has to do with my own fear that things like T-shirts and posters are usually feeble tools to address the enormous problems we face as a society today. Sometimes, of course, something really clicks, but in my own work I dread the sense that I’m using something bad in the world as an excuse to make a clever design. Often, it just makes more sense to me to simply support a candidate or donate money to a cause.

I’ve seen some propagandistic design work that I’ve liked-I’m thinking of the campaign that Number Seventeen did to launch Air America (I did a DO post on this called “Catharsis and the Limits of Empire”)-but what I really admire is clear information design. Nigel Holmes did a piece in Harpers several months ago (tragically unavailable online) on America’s addiction to debt that was really amazing. Similarly, I admire the way that Mgmt. translated Al Gore’s Powerpoint show on global warming into the book that accompanies the movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Speaking of Harpers, Art Spiegleman also did a great article last month in which he analyzed-rated, really-the notorious Danish Mohammed cartoons. Absolutely fascinating. Not available online either!

PM: Okay. I’m going to switch gears here. Another Adaptive Pather, Ryan Freitas, has mentioned you a couple times on his blog, and I wanted to follow up his thoughts. His first post came after your appearance at SFMOMA, where you spoke about Pentagram’s work with United on developing the identity for Ted. He was struck by how effective the Wall Street Journal articles from the future were at communicating your vision.

His second post came a little later, prompted by your entry “Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content”, and he quoted this passage:

Over the years, I came to realize that my best work has always involved subjects that interested me, or-even better-subjects about which I’ve become interested, and even passionate about, through the very process of doing design work. …To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you’re interested in, the better your work will be.

What I was wondering, re-reading Ryan’s posts, was how these two notions might be connected. How your work for United was influenced by your multifarious passions. And, perhaps related (you tell me), how you hit upon the Wall Street Journal mockups as a tool to communicate your concept. Have you used such “tangible futures” in your work before?

MB: Being able to make vivid counterfeits is one of the joys of being a graphic designer, and one that we don’t take enough pleasure in. One of my partners in London once mocked up a whole issue of Fortune to help a client see his business differently.

One of the hard lessons I had to learn as a designer starting out was that good design is not a self-evident imperative for most people. I tell students that they are spending time and money in design school acquiring an abnormal sensitivity to design that most regular people should not be expected to share. Yet various groups of these “regular people” are usually the ones who initiate our work, fund and approve it, and ultimately are the audiences for it. So the biggest challenge we face is figuring out how to meet people on their terms, not ours.

I never talk about “educating the client.” I hate that phrase. Almost always it’s the designers who need the education, not the client, not the audience. Yet designers and clients both tend to recede into their areas of expertise, and it takes work for us to wrench each other out of it. Making prototypes that help people imagine the effects that design decisions will have in the real world can be a very potent tool. Those fake Wall Street Journal articles were supposed to do exactly that: remind a client who had spent six months showing themselves PowerPoint presentations that there was a real world out there filled with people who didn’t share their fascination with their business strategy or, actually, care at all whether they succeeded at all. It’s a good reality check, and it helps to shift the design work from an internal exercise that’s done for management approval, to work that’s done because you’re seeking results with real people in the real world.

So of course-to get to the other part of your question-dealing with the real world means being as interested as possible in stuff that’s not about design. All of the work I’ve done that I’m proud of somehow emerged from the fact that I’ve gotten really interested in that other part: the subject matter of a book, the business of a client, the content of an exhibition. Luckily I can get interested in nearly anything. And I have learned the hard way that there are a few things I’m just not interested in, and can’t seem to do good design for: I avoid these projects now.

Professional Societies, Blogging, And Designing Without Borders

PM: From 1998-2001 you were president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (now known as “AIGA, the professional association for design”). As such, you had broad exposure to what was being done in graphic design. What did that role help you realize about the field and practice of design that you could not have found out any other way? What insight or wisdom did it provide that can aid others in their day-to-day practice of design?

MB: I’ve been involved with AIGA for a long time. I did a mix tape for the very first event of the New York chapter back in the early 80s. I met my future partners at Pentagram - Paula Scher, Woody Pirtle, Colin Forbes - through the AIGA. I met Bill Drenttel and Jessica Helfand through the AIGA, and we announced the founding of our blog, Design Observer, at an AIGA conference. I’ve been inspired by countless other people I could have only known through AIGA. I always thought that AIGA was fantastic at this aspect of the profession.

On the other hand, when I was President of the organization, I always had the sense that people felt vaguely guilty about this social aspect of AIGA. I think the attitude tended to be “I don’t need help making friends.” Instead, what our members always wanted was something else: they wanted AIGA to increase the respect that design gets from the general public, especially from the business community. Now, this is really a challenge. The fantasy was that there could be a kind of invisible gas that could be discharged into the air of every boardroom in America, and all those clients out there would just somehow become mysteriously receptive to suggestions from designers, more inclined to obey us, and of course pay us more. It’s a nice dream, but it’s only a dream. There is no such invisible gas.

The only way design gets more respect is when an individual designer creates a great design for a single client. It’s a war that’s fought one little battle at a time, and with each victory, things get - in some ways at least - a little bit better. The best thing AIGA has done for me, then, is exposed me to people and ideas who have made me a better designer, and a more effective fighter for design.

PM: You mentioned Design Observer and being exposed to people and ideas. You’ve been writing for Design Observer for almost 3 years now. How has blogging effected the way you work? What effect has it had on how you approach design?

MB: I’ve always liked writing, but I didn’t take it seriously until we started Design Observer. There are many things I like about blogging. Selfishly, it gives me a way to think through issues with the discipline that happens when you put things in writing. To the extent that people read the pieces, particularly from outside the profession, I hope it gives them a little more insight into what the world of design is all about. If you’re reading a long comment thread, the really interesting contributions can seem few and far between.

It’s the offline contacts and conversations that have been more rewarding for me. A few times I’ve walked into a meeting and I’ll be surprised by someone who brings up something from the blog. More often than not, this person isn’t even a designer. To me, this means that design is becoming something that normal people are getting more and more curious about.

Has writing a blog effected the way I work? At first I was going to say no, but when I think about it, I realize that it’s helped me get more confident that the issues that we designers deal with are relevant in the outside world. This in turn has helped me think less as a designer faithfully sticking to the task I’ve been assigned, to a person who’s willing and eager to broaden the context for the work. Like I’ve said before, this is the only way I know to make my work better.

PM: Michael, I want to thank you for the time you’ve taken in speaking (well, writing) with me on these various subjects of design, strategy, politics, and practice. I’ve seen your thoughtful comments make their way all around the blogosphere, and I’m thankful to have had a small hand in that!

Your statement about evolving into a “person who’s willing and eager to broaden the context for the work,” resonates very strongly with what we’re trying to achieve with our User Experience Week event. In prior years, we focused on issues of web design; whereas this year, alongside our web design material, are discussions of product strategy and design, design of services, cross-cultural research, mobile devices, museum design, comics, and information visualization.

So, I guess what I’d like you to expand a bit on “the issues that we designers deal with [that] are relevant in the outside world.” Is it that these designers’ issues have actually always been relevant, and the outside world only now realizes it? Or is it that designers are only now addressing these issues relevant in the outside world. Whichever, what has lead to this change? Any examples from your work you could share?

MB: Back in 1975, I was relatively precocious. I knew what graphic design was (most 17-year-olds didn’t), and I entered a university program in graphic design that started teaching graphic design studio classes in its freshman year (many such courses didn’t). I was really into graphic design so I couldn’t have been happier.

It took me a while to discover that graphic design was a fairly new profession, and that many of the designers who did work that I admired had received a more general education than I was getting. This included not just early heroes of mine like Paul Rand, but mentors I’d meet later like Massimo Vignelli and Tibor Kalman. I got a great education in the skills a designer needs. But I slowly learned that mastering the skills of design was only one element to being successful and effective as a designer.

To this day, I’m not even sure it’s the most important skill. I don’t think I’m a great natural designer compared to most of my partners. I probably wasn’t even the best designer in my class at school. But 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.

Making room for the real world is even harder today than it was 30 years ago. The amount of technical skills a young designer needs is vast, and the degree of professional specialization is staggering. All of this helps to foster an atmosphere that seems to reward tunnel vision. But in the end, the designers who are doing the most exciting work - and in some cases it coincidentally happens to be the most beautiful work - are the ones who don’t hesitate to claim the whole world as their subject matter.

Peter Merholz is President and a founding partner of Adaptive Path, the world’s premier user experience consulting company. He is an experienced information architect, writer, speaker, and leader in the field of user-experience design. Clients include Cathay Pacific, Yamaha, and the California Health Care Foundation.