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

Protégé of design legend Massimo Vignelli and partner in the New York office of the international design firm Pentagram, Michael Bierut has had one of the most varied careers of any living graphic designer. The projects he presents in this book illustrate the breadth of activity that graphic design encompasses today, his goal being to demonstrate not a single ideology, but the enthusiastically eclectic approach that has been a hallmark of his career.

Each project is told in Bierut’s own entertaining voice and shown through historic images, preliminary drawings (including full-size reproductions of the notebooks he has maintained for over thirty-five years), working models and rejected alternatives, as well as the finished work. Along the way, he provides insights into the creative process, his working life, his relationship with clients, and the struggles that any design professional faces in bringing innovative ideas to the world today.

This revised and expanded edition of Bierut’s bestselling monograph features new projects for major clients, such as Mastercard and The Poetry Foundation. Inspiring, informative and authoritative, How to… is a bible of graphic design ideas.

About the Author

Michael Bierut has practised every genre of graphic design, from books and posters to packaging and signage, for a broad range of clients. He has won hundreds of design awards and his work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Bierut is both a senior critic at Yale's School of Art and a fellow of its School of Management.