Michael Bierut

Michael Bierut is a partner in the New York office of the international design consultancy Pentagram, where his clients have included the New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue, Mastercard, MIT Media Lab, and Hillary Clinton. He is a cofounder of the website Design Observer and the author of several books on design, including Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design (2012); How to use graphic design to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry and (every once in a while) change the world (2015); and Now You See It (2017).

Bierut’s first job after graduating from the University of Cincinnati was with legendary designer Massimo Vignelli, where he worked for ten years before joining Pentagram. He is a past president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and he has received the AIGA Medal and a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award. He teaches at the Yale University School of Art and the Yale School of Management.