Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design [Hardcover]

Michael Bierut (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Bierut is a writer who balances equal dose of optimism and skepticism to draw readers in and let them find their own way out. Each of the 79 essays is printed in a different typeface, and though a reader could probably do without Bulmer and Danubia, reading the changing text is part of the enjoyable adventure as Bierut looks at ordinary circumstances of design that have the ability to create extraordinary consequences in life. -- Communication Arts, August 2007

Highbrow and brilliant. -- New York Magazine, The Approval Matrix, August 2007

I was rewarded every time I dipped into this elegant, thoughtful compilation of stand-alone essays. -- Adage, November 2007

In this lively collection of previously published essays, Michael Bierut provides a compulsively readable guide to all things design. While fonts and logos receive their expected due, so too do Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal, treadmill tripping, and enormous wild geese. -- Dwell, January 2008

Topics range from design-related discourses on how to become famous or deal with a client to art, economics, history, war, politics and books. Even the redesigned Food Pyramid gets a section. Regardless of the topic, Bierut's sometimes-bemused voice and peircing intelligence illuminate the central role of design in our lives. -- STEP Inside Design, August 2007

"A very well written, witty book that should find its way into any truly nerdy Dwell reader's bathroom." --Dwell Magazine

Product Description

Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design brings together the best of designer Michael Bierut's critical writing serious or humorous, flattering or biting, but always on the mark. Bierut is widely considered the finest observer on design writing today. Covering topics as diverse as Twyla Tharp and ITC Garamond, Bierut's intelligent and accessible texts pull design culture into crisp focus. He touches on classics, like Massimo Vignelli and the cover of The Catcher in the Rye, as well as newcomers, like McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and color-coded terrorism alert levels. Along the way Nabakov's Pale Fire; Eero Saarinen; the paper clip; Celebration, Florida; the planet Saturn; the ClearRx pill bottle; and paper architecture all fall under his pen. His experience as a design practitioner informs his writing and gives it truth. In Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, designers and nondesigners alike can share and revel in his insights.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press; 1st edition (May 31, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568986998
• ISBN-13: 978-1568986999
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #53,270 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Insiders Perspective, November 15, 2007

By	Henry Beer Communication Arts (Boulder CO) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design (Hardcover)

Michael Beirut has collected many of the essays he has written for the Design Observer, a blog he founded with other designers with a focus on graphic design practice and process.

Michael's seasoned perspective on the education of young designers, the events and experiences he turned to his advantage as a young person are enlightening and entertaining. He all but pleads to get young designers to recognize that design revolves around life, rather than the other way around. This book may present a challenge for someone not familiar with the personalities, and particularities of graphic design's inner workings. It is a fascinating and well written perspective on the professional's life, which is notable in that Michael is highly successful designer and a partner in the estimable multinatiional design firm, Pentagram.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Not everything is design ..., January 31, 2008

By	Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design (Hardcover)

But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything."

Many of Michael Bierut's 79 essays here appeared online or in other collections. The essays cover an enormous range of topics and touch on an incredible number of people.

Each essay is set in a different typeface, ranging in age from Bembo, designed in 1495, to Flama, created in 2006. Every experienced reader is familiar with the colophones at the end of many books, and many of us recognize Helvetica, Bodoni, Arial, Roman and Times New Roman. At least one font stars in a movie; Helvetica "is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture," and has been well received by Amazon reviewers.

(Virginia Postrel reviewed the book for "The Atlantic" focusing on fonts, and has a very interesting discussion with the director, Gary Hustwit, of "Helvetica" on the Atlantic website.)

Bierut is a senior critic in graphic designs at the Yale School of Art. He is a co-founder of the Design Observer blog. He comments about graphic design in everyday life on the blog and on Public Radio International's "Studio 360."

Here's a sample of the riches here:

"It's not hard to see why innovation is becoming the design world's favorite euphemism. Design sounds cosmetic and ephemeral; innovation sounds energetic and essential. Design conjures images of androgynous figures in black turtlenecks wielding clove cigarettes; innovators are forthright fellows with their shirtsleeves rolled up, covering whiteboards with vigorous magicmarkered diagrams, arrows pointing to words like 'Results!' But best of all, the cult of innovation neatly sidesteps the problem that has befuddled the business case for design from the beginning. Thomas Watson, Jr.'s famous dictum 'good design is good business' implies that there's good design and there's bad design; what he doesn't reveal is how to reliably tell one from the other. Neither has anyone else. It's taken for granted that innovation, however, is always good."

Robert C. Ross 2008

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book, May 9, 2010

By	A. Fuhrman - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design (Hardcover)

As an avid reader of Design Observer, I rushed out to buy a copy of Michael Beirut's essay collection "79 Short Essays on Design." Almost four years later, I think I have finally finished reading this collection. Beirut's collection, though not the most conducive to reading all in one sitting, is continually surprising, and entertaining.
What surprises me most is the depth to which the book reaches on a wide variety of topics on design--from a discussion of t-shirt designs, to falling off a treadmill, it seems that Beirut can find the design in almost anything. That quality in his essays challenges the reader to do the same. Each time I re-read the essays in the book, I come out with a different thing to mull over, a new idea to try in a design solution, or just a funny line to make me smile for a day or two. Few other books I have read rival the long-term rewards of this book.
Perhaps the most fitting way to describe Beirut's mastery of finding the design in the everyday is that same quality he discusses in the essay "What we talk about when we talk about architecture." He begins describing the radio program "Car Talk" where conversations about car troubles can range from philosophy to relationship advice--almost anything, excluding, of course, car trouble. Beirut challenges that design lacks that same kind of community where talking about design can lead to, and connect with, other things.
In this collection of essays, I think he may have found an answer to that.