Let me start with your quote: “I learned how to design at design school. But I learned how to be a designer from Massimo Vignelli”. Michael, you began your professional career at Vignelli Associates in New York. What have you acquired from such a prominent 20th century designer? A lot of people know Massimo’s specific “rules” (grids, typefaces, etc.) and I learned a lot from them. But 25 years after leaving Vignelli Associates, what really continues to influence me are not his rules but his ethos. Massimo was eternally optimistic, never cynical. He approached every project, no matter how big or small, as an opportunity to do something great. He never gave up and did something just for the money. He tried to work with people he liked and respected, as clients, as colleagues, as employees. Finally, he stayed engaged and curious about the world of design, and the world in general, up until the end of his life; I saw him three days before he died, and he was as excited about life as he was the day I met him. I wish I could be the same way.
Apart from Massimo Vignelli, who has been the most influential figure in your professional life? I have been married for 35 years to my high school sweetheart, Dorothy. We met when we were 15 years old. She’s not a designer, she’s a businesswoman turned psychotherapist. Spending so much time with someone who isn’t a designer stops me from getting too self-involved (or even more self-involved), and reminds me that most of the world doesn’t know the names of typefaces and PMS colors.
Why did you join Pentagram after 10 years of working in Vignelli Associates?
After ten years for working for Massimo and Lella Vignelli, I was ready — probably more than ready — to try to figure out what my own individual voice as a designer would be. Yet at the same time I had become accustomed to being part of a larger group who could provide inspiration and support. As it turns out, Pentagram is set up to combine both of those things. Each partner runs a small team independently, which functions almost like an independent studio. Yet we all work in the context of the larger group, which provides financial and administrative stability, but — more importantly — a wide range of points of view about what design can be. My partners are among the best designers in the world, and I am lucky to be among them.
All of the 19 partners at Pentagram are equal. There’s no boss, nor is there an external managing director. The partners in each of the five offices manage their own affairs, and decisions are reached by consensus. That said, different partners have developed specific areas of expertise, based on their own interests and experiences. So we might look to a few partners for leadership when we’re talking about a financial issue, and others if we’re talking about a technological issue, and so forth. And of course, when I was brand new to Pentagram, I liked to think that youth and energy counted for a lot. Now I have a lot more respect for the wisdom that comes with seniority!
In 2006, you won the AIGA Medal, the highest honor of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. How is this medal of particular importance in your professional life?
AIGA has played a big role in my professional career. My heroes have always played a role in the leadership of AIGA, and my own involvement with them introduced me to my future partners Woody Pirtle and Paula Scher. They have always been great advocates for design, and being recognized by them on any level has been a serious honor. To get the AIGA Medal was one of the high points of my career.
Great brand names and clients can be seen among your clients, from Walt Disney to Princeton University and the Yale School of Architecture, from the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the Library of Congress. What is your philosophy in designing for such broad range of clients?
Because I have a small team, I’ve had the ability to pick my clients carefully. I try to work on interesting projects for people I like who are doing things I respect. In my approach, I try not to distinguish between big clients and small ones, between commercial clients and non-profits. We live in a world where each of us might go to a museum one day and buy a bag of peanuts the next day. If there is a chance for graphic design to improve either of those experiences, not to mention all the ones in between, I’ll take it.
Let’s talk about your latest book, How to …, that is published recently. How was this book formed, what topics does it include, and why did you choose such a title for it: 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?
I have been thinking of putting together a collection of my work for a while, but I’ve had trouble picturing what form the book should take. There have been so many great design monographs in the past ten years or so, from designers like Bruce Mau and Marian Bantjes, and even from my partners Paula Scher and Abbott Miller, each of them a really interesting extension of the form. I finally gave myself permission to do a book in the tradition of the ones that inspired me when I first started my career like “Graphic Design” by Milton Glaser and “The Art of Advertising” by George Lois. When I was a young designer, books like these demystified the design process, and made me feel I was hearing directly from the designers about how they did their work. My book is a series of 36 short case histories, each of which taught me a specific lesson about how design works of how it doesn’t work. The title is an homage to a slightly obscure collection from one of my favorite authors, the philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco. For years he wrote a column in an Italian newspaper, and he eventually collected them all in a book called “How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays.” Each essay starts with the words “How to…” and I liked the effect so much that I simply stole it for my own book.
As I have realized, your professional career is of a multifaceted nature. You are a designer, writer of various articles, and university professor. In the meanwhile, you have established the Design Observer website with your associates. Which of these positions is essential for you and why?
I have often said I have a limited attention span. I’m not sure I could just sit and design all day long. Doing all these different things is a way to keep myself from getting bored. But more importantly, I like to think that each of these different kinds of experience has the capacity to inform the others. I think that being a writer makes me a better designer, for instance, and probably the other way around as well.
By the way, tell us about 100-day project. What was the main purpose of this project?
I’ve always been very much a creature of habit: I jog three miles every morning, for instance, no matter where I am. About 15 years ago, I started doing a number of creative exercises based on the same idea, assigning myself a task to do every day. The first one I did for a year, doing a drawing every day based on a photograph in that day’s New York Times. The head of the Graphic Design Department at the Yale School of Art, where I teach, heard about this and suggested it could make an interesting assignment for the students. I usually teach one all-day workshop in the fall and one in the spring. I took out a calendar saw there were exactly 100 days in between them. That’s how the project was born. I think its popularity is due to the way it combines something completely open-ended — the thing you do every day is totally up to you — with something very specific, that nice round number of 100 days. What you learn is that it’s a waste of time to wait for inspiration to strike: great designers and artists simply apply themselves to the work at hand, day in and day out.
Please explain the method and process of your collaboration with your design team in Pentagram. What is the role of the partners-in-charge in the projects?
I have a great team of designers with whom I work really closely. I also am responsible for the relationship we have with our clients. So my main responsibility is seeing to it that everything stays connected. For certain projects, I might have a very specific idea about what the design solution should be. For others, I might indicate a more general direction. In either case, I’m involved over the whole course of the project, sometimes very intensely, sometimes loosely. Helping our clients understand and accept the solutions we propose is probably the toughest part of the job, and the thing I’m best at.
Let’s talk about “The Bridge، Cornell Tech,” the last visual identity design project you carried out with your team. There you worked along with an associate designer, musicians, etc. You are both designer and writer of the project. What does it mean?
This is a new development on the campus of the first university complex to be built in New York City in almost 100 years — Cornell’s campus on Roosevelt Island — which will be dedicated to technology, science and engineering. Our client is building a commercial office there that will be a home to private companies who see the advantage of being in this kind of academic setting. The assignment was to create a name and graphic identity for the project, but also create the overarching argument for locating a business there. The name was actually suggested by the architectural team; building on an island, they were inspired by the structure of the surrounding bridges. Calling the project “The Bridge” also suggested the way that bridges connect things. I thought it would be nice to have a wordmark made up of interconnected pieces. Designer Hamish Smythe found a typeface called Three Six. Meanwhile, as part of the design process, I had written a piece describing how important connections are to invention, and why this would be the right place for it. Hamish and Todd Goldstein, a designer from my partner Emily Oberman’s team, put together the animation that brought the written statement to life. My son Drew, who is a filmmaker himself, introduced me to composer Jacobi Rosati. The resulting 60-second animation introduced this new development to world.