Left The result has the expressive sense offlow that the client had asked for from the very beginning. 215 30/04/2015 14:01 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 21
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How to top the charts Billboard Above The Bible of the music industry as I knew it as a kid in 1966. Opposite The minutely calibrated Hot 100 chart, shown here at actual size, is crammed with detail and designed to reward close scrutiny. Like many kids in the 1960s, I was obsessed with music. But, unlike most of my friends, I wasn’t content with the Top 40 countdown on the radio. Instead, I went each week to the periodicals room of our local library, where I spent hours with the Bible of the music industry, Billboard. Billboard is one of America’s oldest publications, founded in 1894 as a trade magazine for the outdoor advertising industry. It expanded to cover circuses, vaudeville, carnivals, and—with the invention of the jukebox in the 1930s—music, which became its ultimate focus. Responding to the rise of rock and roll, it introduced the legendary Hot 100 singles chart just a few weeks before my first birthday in August 1958. I’m not sure why I found the Hot 100 chart, and its counterpart list of the top 200 albums, so mesmerizing. Maybe I found comfort in seeing that popularity, a property that utterly confounded me in my junior high school’s cafeteria, could be minutely calculated. It was a vicarious triumph every time one of my favorite groups hit number one. No matter that the charts were surrounded by baffling jargon. It was like being an insider at last. So it was a thrill, 40 years later, to be asked to redesign Billboard for the new world of digital music. The logo, for instance, had barely changed since “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James and the Shondells was number one in 1966. But the number of charts had ballooned, tracking everything from regional Mexican albums to ringtones. This was one of the more complex information design projects I’ve ever done. Working with Billboard’s art director, Andrew Horton, we created a 14-column grid to unify the publication from front to back. We strengthened the logo, focusing on its simple geometry and bright primary colors. And the charts, which had degenerated into a murky pastel toned backwater, were restored to their former authority in bold black and white, with an emphasis on legibility. It turns out that even in the digital era, pop artists still dis- played the charts showing their first appearance at number one. We created information design that was suitable for framing. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 217 217 30/04/2015 14:0
Right The magazine’s name, almost every letter of which is made of either circles, vertical lines, or both, is a designer’s dream. Even when we completely deconstructed it, it was still legible. The logo before the redesign is at the top. The final is at the bottom. Some of the dozens of versions we considered are in between. 218 Billboard 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 218 30/04/2015 14:0
Right The new consumer-style cover approach signaled that the magazine that was indispensible to industry insiders could also be accessible to enthusiastic fans. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 219 219 30/04/2015 14:0
Right The bold black and-white geometry of the logo suggested a similarly constructed headline typeface, as well as an emphasis on high-contrast layout elements. Opposite The charts, which had become a cluttered afterthought, were restored to their former iconic glory, thanks to the hard work of Pentagram’s Laitsz Ho and Michael Deal. 220 Billboard 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 220 30/04/2015 14:0
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Right The Billboard Hot 100 chart is an icon of pop culture. In our redesign, readers can easily follow the progression of each song up the chart. Fast-rising hits appear as white “bullets,” and weekly awards for biggest gains are marked with red banner icons. Each track’s peak position and weeks on the chart appear to the right of the title. The data is set in Christian Schwartz’s easy-to-read Amplitude, and chart names, like headlines throughout the magazine, appear in Aurèle Sack’s round-as- a-record LL Brown. 222 Billboard 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 222 30/04/2015 14:0
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How to convince people Ted Opposite We had a simple premise for the Ted brand: white plane, simple name, really big. As I told the New York Times when the brand launched, “When we hit on it, we realized we were on to something… It was a modest miracle that there inside the United name is that nickname, ready-made.” 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 225 When I graduated from design school, I thought that a great idea should sell itself. Not true. It turns out coming up with the right solution to a design problem is only the first step. The next, crucial step is convincing other people that your solution is the right one. Why is this so hard? First, while sometimes we’re fortunate enough to have a single strong-minded client, often we have to persuade a group. And the more important the project, the bigger (and more unruly) the group. Second, the correctness of a design decision can seldom be checked with a calculator. Rather, it relies on ambiguous things like intuition and taste. Finally, any good design decision requires, in the end, a leap of faith. To bring our risk-adverse congregations to salvation, we often have to transform boardrooms into revival tents. In 2003, our client United Airlines decided to launch a low cost operation to compete with JetBlue and Southwest, as well as newcomers like Delta’s Song and Air Canada’s Tango. They asked us to design the new carrier and, to make the challenge even harder, to come up with a name. (Not everyone thinks they’re a designer, but anyone who’s ever had a pet goldfish is a naming expert.) After several months of work, the review of 100-plus names, and a few abortive presentations, my partner Daniel Weil and our colleague David Gibbs came up with a perfect moniker for a carrier that would be United’s personable, friendly, more casual little sibling: Ted, a name that actually was a nickname, derived from the last three letters in its big brother’s well-established brandmark. We were convinced. But we knew that convincing our client would be a delicate process involving people from all over the company, up to and including marketing head John Teague and chairman Glenn Tilton. We assembled a 65-slide presentation that made the decision seem not just inevitable but fun. To this day, of all the presentations I’ve ever given, this is my favorite. 225 30/04/2015 14:0
Left We wanted to position the new carrier as a natural addition to United’s portfolio of offerings, rather than a late entry to a game everyone else was already playing. To make the difference as vivid as possible, we started the presentation with two imaginary Wall Street Journal stories. As everyone knows, a good presentation tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end. By the time we got involved, our clients had been working on the business case for United’s low-cost carrier for nearly a year. It was important to remind them that the outside world didn’t know anything about their strategy, and didn’t necessarily care if they succeeded. A point of distinction for United was that the new airline would be integrated into their huge network. This meant that its design would have to be coordinated with all the work we were doing for the rest of United, including the way the airplanes were painted. We deliberately decided to separate the decision about the design of the new carrier from the choice of name; combining the two tended to muddle the discussion because people inevitably liked one name but another design. I gave this presentation over and over again to various teams at the company. This was one of the few presentations I’ve ever prepared that worked every time. It helped that we had a great solution. 226 Ted 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 226 30/04/2015 14:0
Right Each existing operational division had an established design appearance. How would the new carrier fit in? Above We used two diagrams to show that the internal view of the organization (operational divisions) was different from the customers’ view (an interconnected network). Above I usually prefer images to lists of words in presentations, but with this audience the words would resonate. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 227 227 227 30/04/2015 14:0
; Above Picking the name and picking the design were treated as related, but separate, decisions. Using a placeholder name, we demonstrated the critical choice: should the new carrier look like United, or look different? Right Our recom mendation— close enough to reassure, different enough to surprise— used United’s typography and retained its “tulip” symbol, but introduced a new color, orange-yellow, the opposite of their corporate blue. 228 Ted 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 228 30/04/2015 14:0
Above We considered five names in all, showing pros and cons for each. All were viable, but we saved our favorite for last. Above Presentations happen in windowless rooms, so it’s important to keep letting the outside world in. Here we lay out the universe of existing low-cost carrier names in which United’s new entry would compete. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 229 229 30/04/2015 14:0
We later changed the tagline to “Part of United,” which was direct, simple, and true in more ways than one. The audience would always laugh at the answer (and the specious math behind it) but the point was made: the new name had been hiding in plain sight all along. Right People immediately understood the advantages of having a human name (and a nickname at that) to signal a more personal style of service; it made the other choices seem contrived. The treatment of the logo we presented borrowed the capital T from the United logotype. Above Revealing our recommended name was my favorite part of the presentation. “How much have you invested in promoting this name over the past 75 years?” I would ask. “A billion dollars? What if I told you we could give you a name that already had $500 million behind it?” 230 Ted 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 230 30/04/2015 14:0
Above Applying the new name and logotype to imaginary prototypes helped the client see how the proposal would play out in real life. Pentagram designer Brett Traylor’s mock headline “Ted took me to Phoenix and I used my hus- band’s miles” actually ran. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 231 231 30/04/2015 14:0
But Ted was consistently profitable, and many of the innovations it pioneered contributed to United’s renaissance as it recov- ered from bankruptcy. Moreover, the team of United people associated with the project had the galvanizing experience of creating something from scratch, and went on to apply that thinking to projects throughout their careers. Right Ted’s debut was preceded by an ingenious teaser cam- paign devised by Stuart D’Rozario and Bob Barrie at their ad agency Fallon Worldwide. Over 100 different stunts built mystery about the identity of Ted for months before its launch: buying coffee for everyone in a downtown diner, making donations to local charities, sponsoring runners in marathons, with all the credit going to the mysterious Ted. The mystery was solved when Ted was launched in Denver in February 2004. The experiment lasted only four years before the carrier’s operations were folded back into United’s main business. 232 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 232 30/04/2015 14:0
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How to get where you want to be New York City Department of Transportation Opposite For this project, we joined a team led by planning consultants City ID, which was responsible for determining the basic wayfinding strategy. T-Kartor developed the cartographic database, industrial designers Billings Jackson created the structures for the signs and maps, and RBA Group provided the civil engineering expertise required to install this intricate system in a demanding urban environment. 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 235 New York City is a complicated place. Manhattan is dominated by an orderly grid, its numbered streets and avenues dictated by the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. But downtown, before the grid takes hold, you’ll find West 4th Street intersecting West 11th Street. Meanwhile, in Queens, another 11th Street crosses, in order, 44th Drive, 44th Road, and 44th Avenue. New York’s layout is logical except when it’s not. As for Brooklyn, like they say: forget about it. For years individual neighborhoods sought to guide confused pedestrians by creating their own signs and maps. In the 1990s, we created one such system for the crowded and confusing Financial District, inventing a unique graphic style that worked within the district but had nothing to do with the dozens of other such systems around town. Finally, in 2011, the New York City Department of Transportation decided to create a citywide system called WalkNYC that would unify wayfinding in all five boroughs. We joined a multidisciplinary team that would create maps and signs for five pilot neighborhoods. We quickly found ourselves in a new world where people’s navigating habits had been turned upside down—literally. For years, urban wayfinding often started with a single piece of artwork: a big static map, everything fixed in place, north at the top. But GPS-savvy travelers today expect a map to orient itself in the position of travel and have the ability to zoom in for more detail. Could our system’s printed maps, deployed throughout the city, satisfy these expectations? Using a nimble, infinitely modifiable database capable of multiple orientations and dense detail, our team created analog maps that provide a remarkably digital experience. Handsome, urbane wayfinding fixtures introduced the new system throughout the city in 2013. The maps now appear at bike-share locations, in subway stations, and on express-bus kiosks. Despite the ubiquity of handheld devices, the sidewalks around our wayfinding kiosks are always crowded with people figuring out how to get where they want to be in this beautifully confusing city. 235 30/04/2015 14:0
Urban wayfinding is an extraordinarily compli- cated enterprise that requires the collaboration of a wide range of experts. How do people actually find their way in a complex city? What information do they need? How and where should it be provided? Answering these questions meant conducting dozens of workshops and interviews, stopping pedestrians on the sidewalk to find out where they were going and how they were getting there. The NYC Department of Transportation told us that WalkNYC would affect not just wayfinding, but everything from public health (by encouraging people to walk) to economic development (more sidewalk activity means more shopping). Simplicity was the key, but achieving it was anything but simple. Our task was to translate the cartographic data into maps that we hoped would not only work well, but would become as distinctive a part of New York’s graphic language as Massimo Vignelli’s subway signage or Milton Glaser’s “I Love NY” logo. Opposite We considered many different typefaces for the system, but none conveyed the same authority as Helvetica. No surprise there: users of the New York Subway system have been trusting it since the 1970s, so why not continue the same graphic language above ground? We made one modification I’ve secretly wanted for years: all the square dots are round, a not-so-subtle customization for our client DOT. Right top Consultants City ID led our team in a series of neighborhood tours with local residents and business owners to help determine the location and content of our wayfinding kiosks. Right middle Understanding how people find their way is complicated enough in someplace like an airport, where everyone comes through the same front door and has the same goal. In a city, where people may be starting anywhere and going anywhere, new in town or lifelong residents, in a hurry or ready to get lost, addressing the complexity means making deliberate choices. Right bottom Would we refer to north as uptown? How would we determine walking distances? Which landmarks qualified to appear on the maps? What colors were the most legible at day and at night? The details were seemingly endless. 236 New York City Department of Transportation 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 236 30/04/2015 14:0
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Left Because we were managing a dense jungle of information, we knew every graphic element needed to be perfectly engineered. For instance, the symbol system developed for the US Department of Transportation by Roger Cook and Don Shanosky at the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1974 provided some, but not all, of the icons we’d need. We customized some (changing the bike symbol to match the designs used in the city’s new bike share program) and invented others (a shopping bag bearing New York’s familiar slogan). Below We wanted the
information icons to seem like an extension of the typography. This meant hundreds of small modifications, masterminded by designer Jesse Reed. Opposite Designer Hamish Smyth led our work for the WalkNYC program, including the design of the architectural icons that punctuate each map. Despite technology, some things can’t be automated. It took an army of interns to draw over 100 of them by hand. Each one is a gem. 238 New York City Department of Transportation 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 238 30/04/2015 14:0
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Next spread The maps achieved instant ubiquity when they were deployed throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn as part of the city’s first bike- share program. Thousands of people use the bikes; millions use the maps. “Heads-up mapping” is the cartographic conven- tion where the orientation of the map depends on the direction the viewer is facing. With traditional maps, north is always up. With heads-up maps, if the viewer is facing south, the map is turned so that south is at the top. Many were dubious— including me—that such a system would work in a city where, so it’s said, “the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.” But I was persuaded by early tests that showed the new method was favored by an astounding 84 percent of users. Clearly, digital maps and global positioning systems have changed the way we navigate. Later, the New York Times, reporting on the system, conducted a more informal poll and discovered six out of ten New Yorkers on the street couldn’t point north. Heads-up mapping is here to stay. Left top The color scheme of the maps was much debated. We recommended a subdued palette of muted grays that matched the city itself. Left bottom A family of kiosks of different shapes and sizes were deployed throughout the city; large kiosks were installed at major decision points; the smallest serve as guideposts in busy areas where space is at a premium. In effect, signs’ sizes respond to their surroundings. Opposite Each sign conveys an astonishing amount of information. Maps are printed on vinyl and installed behind glass panels that can be easily dismantled when updates are required. 240 New York City Department of Transportation 00882_Bierut_CS5.5_PENTAGRAM_02.indd 240 30/04/2015 14:0
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