How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things

by Michael Bierut

  Grand Central Terminal, 2013. The clock hands hint at the landmark’s birthdate: 7:13 pm, or 19:13. Penguin Press, 2014. Publisher’s mark based on the pilcrow, the typographic designation for paragraph. Flatiron/23rd Street Partnership Business Improvement District, 2006. The mark’s form evokes both the neighborhood’s street plan and the namesake building’s silhouette. Fashion Law Institute, 2011. A classic visual pun. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 185 185 30/04/2015 14:0

  Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 1999. A new Tadao Ando building set on a reflecting pool. Midwood Equities, 2014. Building blocks for real estate developers. Scripps College, 2009. The investiture of the school’s eighth president. Chambers Hotel, 2001. Monogram as infographic. 186 Logotypes and symbols 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 186 30/04/2015 14:0

  Families for Excellent Schools, 2014. Letterforms create partnership. Tenement Museum, 2007. New York’s most unusual, and intimate, historic site. Fulton Center, 2014. Transportation hub skylit by a glass atrium. Yale School of Management, 2008. The heraldry of the conference table. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 187 187 30/04/2015 14:0

  Museum of Sex, 2002. Nonprofit dedicated to human sexuality. 188 Logotypes and symbols 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 188 30/04/2015 14:0

  March of Dimes, 1998. Nonprofit dedicated to infant health. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 189 189 30/04/2015 14:0

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  How to squash a vote The Voting Booth Project Opposite A crushed voting booth symbolizes the messy and much-disputed outcome of the 2000 presidential election. Above We designed both the Voting Booth Project exhibition and the show’s catalog. The punched-out letters on the book’s die-cut cover are an obvious reference to the “hanging chads” that dominated the recount following the election. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 191 After the debacle of the 2000 elections, when confusion over Palm Beach County’s notorious “butterfly ballots” threw the outcome of the presidential election into a weeks-long limbo, the state offlorida decommissioned its Votomatic portable voting booths and put them up for sale on eBay. Seeing a chance to own a piece of history, New York City hotelier André Balazs bought 100 for $10 each and gave some away to friends. What to do with the rest? Paul Goldberger, then dean of the Parsons School of Design, suggested an exhibition in the school’s gallery. Fifty designers and artists, including David Byrne, Bonnie Siegler and Emily Oberman, Milton Glaser, and Maira Kalman, were each given a booth and invited to alter it. We were asked to design the exhibition, curated by the ingenious Chee Pearlman, and to contribute a booth of our own. The show opened in October 2004, just in time for that year’s presidential election. Most of the designers transformed the booths in delightfully complex and delicate ways. My partner Jim Biber and I took a much less subtle approach: we drove over the booth with a 1.5-ton steamroller. It turns out it’s remarkably easy to rent a steamroller in New York; you don’t even need a driver’s license to operate it. The spindly-looking Votomatic, however, proved to be surprisingly (and perhaps reassuringly) resilient. It took multiple passes to flatten it. The controlled violence of the entire process was cathartic. The result was a handsome piece of sculpture in the style of John Chamberlain, but the blunt means seemed to demand an even blunter message. Why bother with subtlety? We bought a tiny plastic elephant—the symbol of the Republican Party—and positioned it atop the pile, leaving no doubt as to who was doing the crushing. 191 30/04/2015 14:0

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  How to travel through time Lever House Above Lever House introduced the glass and steel skyscraper to midtown Manhattan and set a standard for New York office buildings for the next half century. Opposite SOM and William Georgis undertook a careful restoration of Gordon Bunshaft’s 1952 Lever House for its 50th anniversary. We took the same approach to the signage. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 193 Architects, product designers, and fashion designers have so much to work with: steel and glass, plastics and polymers, fabrics and finishes. Graphic designers, living in a world of paper and pixels, often find our choices reduced to one: what typeface will we use? But that single choice exerts an outsized influence. “Words have meaning and type has spirit,” my partner Paula Scher has said. That spirit can be contentious, elusive, and ineffable, but it is our secret weapon and most powerful tool. In 1999, we received a call from designer William Georgis. The landmark Lever House was approaching its 50th anniversary. Georgis and the building’s original architects, SOM, were working on a careful restoration. All of its old signs would need to be replaced, and new ones would be needed to satisfy 21st-century building codes. Would we join as graphic design consultants? Lever House transformed New York when it was opened in 1952. SOM’s Gordon Bunshaft conceived a glass and steel skyscraper, the first on upper Park Avenue, until then an unbroken wall of brown masonry buildings. The tower rises above a horizontal slab which itself is lifted from the street to create an open, light-filled pedestrian colonnade. The overall effect is surprisingly delicate. Hans and Florence Knoll were recruited to do the interiors, and Raymond Loewy designed public exhibitions and, it was suspected, the signs. It took only one look at what remained of the signs to confirm that they matched no modern typeface. We decided we had no choice but to use most of our budget to extrapolate an entirely new typeface from the handful of surviving letterforms. Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones were commissioned to undertake this exercise in forensic font reconstruction. The result, Lever Sans, is perfect. It evokes the Mad Men era without resorting to the easy tropes of cliché: typeface as time machine. It’s absurd to claim that a single capital R can conjure the New York inhabited by Cary Grant in North by Northwest. I make that claim here. 193 30/04/2015 14:0

  Right New uses, new tenants, and new regulations required new signs. In addition, all the existing signs were removed and carefully replaced with brand-new ones, each one set in Lever Sans. Our hope was that no one would notice the difference. Above It would have been easy to use an existing typeface like Futura or Neutraface for the Lever House program. But the vintage signs, even though damaged and missing letters, were too distinctive to ignore. Opposite Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones created an entire alphabet from eight letters. Designing the numbers, for which no precedent could be found, was particularly challenging. The result was an original typeface that was as suited to its setting as every other one of the building’s details. 194 Lever House 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 194 30/04/2015 14:0

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  How to pack for a long flight United Airlines Opposite and above The United symbol, called “the tulip” inside the company, was created in 1973 by the legendary designer Saul Bass. It had fallen into disuse before we decided to reinvigorate it. Our work with United Airlines included experiments in “branding without branding,” such as Daniel Weil’s use of the geometry of the symbol to generate the curve of the onboard coffee cup. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 197 The marketing team at United Airlines was looking for a design consultant. I was told later that we were the only designers they met who seemed to express no interest in changing the way the aircraft were painted. “Passengers don’t ride on the outside of the planes,” I remember telling them. In truth, we had never done an airline before, and had no repainted planes in our portfolio. Instead, at our interview we talked about the things we knew how to design: restaurants, magazines, signs, coffee cups. I reasoned that what an airline really needed was not design as promotion but design as experience. That began a 15-year relationship. At the very start,I brought in a partner from our London office, the multidisciplinary, multilingual, multitalented Daniel Weil. Danny headed up the three-dimensional projects. I focused on two dimensions. The two of us went to United’s headquarters in Chicago for several days once a month, meeting with teams from all over the organization. On
e client is a challenge. With hundreds of clients, as we had here, the challenges mount geometrically. Our strategy was not to design a set of abstract guidelines, but to burrow in and work guerilla-style on actual projects, large and small, methodically building a case for what a modern airline could look and feel like. We designed the housing and the user interface for one of the first automatic ticket dispensers. We designed menus, forks and spoons, concourse signage, blankets and pillows. We restored the classic logo designed by Saul Bass. And, about eight years in, we finally managed to repaint the planes. It was not destined to last. United merged with a rival, and in a series of trade-offs motivated less by marketing theory than by the logic of the deal memo, they married their name to their new partner’s symbol. A new era began, without us. It had been an amazing ride. 197 30/04/2015 14:0

  Below We persuaded our client to omit the modifier “Airlines” and created a new wordmark to emphasize the suggestive power of their name, such a great descriptor for what makes air travel successful. 198 United Airlines 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 198 30/04/2015 14:0

  Above right Our redesign of the airline’s clubs included new entrance signs. Below We introduced a new way of using the United symbol, as a sweeping motif that suggested the drama offlight. Above left Whenever possible, we tried to improve the way passengers were given information, including at departure gates. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 199 199 30/04/2015 14:0

  Above right Reducing waste on board meant finding efficient ways to print and recycle items like menus. Above left The passen- ger’s flying experience depends less on branding and more on things to touch and feel. We proposed new blankets long before we suggested changing the logo on the outside of the plane. Below Amenities kits, holding toothpaste and eyeshades, were designed to be both lightweight and reusable. 200 United Airlines 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 200 30/04/2015 14:0

  Left Early on, we produced a guidelines document that set out a set of simple principles for designing the United way. Above and next spread Finally, after nearly eight years of work, the time was right to begin painting the plane exteriors to match the airline’s new spirit. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 201 201 30/04/2015 14:0

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  How to have fun with a brown cardboard box Nuts.com Above The previous packaging featured the incongruous name “Nuts Online.” Opposite Founded by “Poppy” Sol Braverman just before the Great Depression, Nuts.com, then the Newark Nut Company, now also sells dried fruit, snacks, chocolate, and coffee. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 205 Jeff Braverman wasn’t planning on going into the family business. His grandfather had founded the Newark Nut Company in 1929, selling peanuts from a single cart in the city’s Mulberry Street Market. Jeff’s father and uncles had turned it into a modest retail operation by the time Jeff went to Wharton School of Business in 1998. He was planning to become a banker. But in his spare time, he set up a website with a quintes- sentially redundant Web 1.0 name: nutsonline.com. “My goal for the website was ten orders a day,” Jeff told Inc. Almost immediately, the online orders overtook the retail sales. Jeff left the world of banking and took over the nut business. Within a dozen years, the site offered nearly 2,000 items and was ringing up $20 million in sales annually. And Jeff could finally get the URL he always wanted: Nuts.com. With a new name in hand, Jeff asked us to redesign the company’s packaging. Consumer packaging is a grim subset of American design. Big corporations, addicted to customer focus groups, dominate the shelves. Minimizing risk inevitably means minimizing beauty, creativity, and distinction. So Jeff’s brief was refreshing. He didn’t have to compete for attention in grocery stores, since customers assembled their orders online. He saw the packages as the gift wrapping his presents arrived in. “I want that arrival to be a big event,” Jeff told us. Nuts.com did no advertising; instead, their shipping cartons functioned as courier-powered billboards. We took inspiration from Jeff and his family. Sitting in a 60,000-square-foot warehouse overseeing a multimillion dollar operation, they were as informal and funny as if they were still running a cart in the Mulberry Street Market. So, no typesetting. My hand-lettering was turned into a custom font called Nutcase, which was used to cover their packages with snack-riddled exhortations, all surrounding cartoon portraits of the Bravermans. Within two years, Nuts.com’s sales had increased by 50 percent: the power of good design driven by authentic, nutty personality. 205 30/04/2015 14:0

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  Opposite My hand- painted letters were converted into the proprietary typeface by designer Jeremy Mickel. Next spread From the brown cardboard box to the individual packages, the receipt of a Nuts.com shipment is meant to be a fun occasion. Right Nuts.com is a family business, and the brilliant illustrator (and former Pentagram intern) Christoph Niemann drew a family portrait. Client Jeff Braverman is second from the right. Below The trans- parent forms of Niemann’s characters reveal the package’s nutty contents. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 207 207 30/04/2015 14:0

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  How to shut up and listen New World Symphony Opposite and above Frank Gehry’s gestural sketch encapsulates the energy of New World Symphony’s Miami Beach home. By coincidence, Gehry had babysat NWS’s artistic director, Michael Tilson Thomas, when the two were growing up in Los Angeles. It all seemed so promising at the beginning. Michael Tilson Thomas, the charismatic and visionary conductor, pianist, and composer, was building a home for his greatest project, New World Symphony. Gifted young musicians from all over the world would come together to study in an extraordinary new building designed by Frank Gehry in the heart of Miami Beach. Music, architecture, learning: when we were asked to design the center’s new logo, it seemed as though there was so much to work with. Tilson Thomas asked for something that “flowed.” Yet a solution eluded us. I was so sure I had hit the bull’s eye with my first solution, a morphing collage of curvy typography. Executive vice president Victoria Roberts told me, as politely as possible, that it made some people there feel ill. A second attempt was less idiosyncratic but perhaps too tame. I tried working with the NWS acronym, something I had resisted at first, but the result felt too stiff and corporate. Through the process, Tilson Thomas was encouraging and supportive, but I could sense his growing impatience. Finally, I got an email with an attachment: six sketches that Tilson Thomas had done for the logo. I was despondent. It was as if he had grown tired of my frantic guesses and just decided to tell me the answer. And the sketches were incomprehensible to me. They showed the three letters of the acronym connected to form something like a swan. Was I just supposed to execute this idea? I wouldn’t presume to tell my client how to conduct an orchestra. How dare anyone tell me how to design a logo! But then I realized that I had been given a gift. Michael Tilson Thomas led a peripatetic life, jetting between engagements all over the world. In the midst of it all, he had found time to think about my problem, and put some thoughts on paper. I looked again at the sketches, and realized the single connected line—like a conductor’s gesture—had one thing that all my work did not: flow. It was what he had been asking for all along, and what I had been too busy to hear. Within hours, I had the solution. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 211 211 30/04/2015 14:0

  Left I was certain that I had solved the problem with my first idea, a flexible identity. Rearranging the three words of the name in curved forms was meant to evoke Gehry’s architecture. NWS’s Victoria Roberts told us that this solution “made people nauseous.” Not the kind of response we had hoped for. Right The alternating serif and sans serif letters in our next idea were meant to suggest the New Wor
ld Symphony’s commitment to the traditional orchestral repertory within the context of a decidedly 21st-century facility. Elegant, but too bland. 212 New World Symphony 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 212 30/04/2015 14:0

  Left I resisted using the letters NWS, reasoning that it had the same number of syllables as the full name and thus offered no economy when said aloud. I also expressed distaste for acronyms in general, despite the fact that my client himself was often called MTT. Our first try was, again, an attempt to imitate the building’s architecture. To suggest more “flow” we also did a hand-drawn version. We liked neither of these. Above The building’s fragmented, episodic interior spaces suggested a positive/ negative treatment of the initial letters. Our designer Yve Ludwig crafted a good solution, but one that I thought looked better suited to a chemical company than a cultural institution. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 213 213 30/04/2015 14:0

  Below Michael Tilson Thomas finally put pen to paper and sent me sketches that I initially found infuriating. Then I realized they provided the key to the answer. The result, which emerged over a long weekend with my notebook, had a surprising sense of symmetry and coherence. Right Connecting the three letters in a single gesture conjured up everything from the motion of a conductor’s baton to the science of sound waves to Frank Gehry’s original sketch. The challenge was how to weave together N, W, and S. Below For the final design, we opted to break the line selectively to make the three letters easier to read. 214 New World Symphony 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 214 30/04/2015 14:0