Michael Bierut

West Side Story > Romeo and Juliet
Jesus Christ Superstar > The New Testament
I really believe this

Saul Bass, 1964

Close, that’s a Seymour Chwast

Surprising and true!

Boston-based art and design collective Silence Dogood takes its name from one of Benjamin Franklin's pseudonyms, and its typographic approach from Franklin's era of printing

The end credits for the season finale of #Severance were turned into a dazzling Saul Bass homage by the show's title typography designer, Teddy Blanks of ChipsNY

When exactly did Tork come out of nowhere and achieve a virtual monopoly in the paper products dispensing space? Just asking questions

Poster for Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design, designed by Jacqueline Casey, photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1982

When Amber Asay invited me on her podcast Women Designers You Should Know, I had one request: can we please do Jacqueline Casey, the in-house designer at MIT who brought European modernism to the USA one campus event poster at a time?
women-designers-you-should-know.simplecast.com/episodes/jac...

That's a poster that Woody Pirtle of Pentagram did in 1988 for Amnesty International in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Woody died last Sunday at 81.

In "Final Cut," the book about auteurist director Michael Cimino's making of "Gates of Heaven," a production so disastrous that it practically brought down United Artists, there is a funny passage where they remember that the movie he really wanted to make was The Fountainhead

Not yet! But not surprised by the F-head influence. Rand picked architecture as the subject explicitly because it sat at the intersection of so many things: art v business, vision v compromise etc. And movie directors like to think they occupy that same position.

Not the first time someone has rewritten your 2012 story, not plagiarism but in an ironic way a demonstration of the basic thesis

Yes, I clicked on "The interview that made me want to quit my job" and could not for the life of me see what the point was. Now we know, I guess

TIL that Adrian Brody's mother is the legendary photographer Sylvia Plachy

I just adore an all-type book cover. Here are three favorites from Matt Dorfman's annual Ten Best list in the New York Times Book Review, by Arsh Raziuddin, Chantal Jahchan and Na Kim www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/b...

Lester Beall with Charles Goslin, The Connecticut General Style Book and Some Notes on Typographic Design for the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, 1958. Images from the amazing thisisdisplay.org

Doggett's papers have just been made available to researchers at Yale's Haas Family Library library.yale.edu/news/papers-...

Terminal routing signs at Houston International Airport

Standardized United Airlines branding at Tampa International Airport

Doggett and her wayfinding plans for Jacksonville International Airport

Jane Davis Doggett, a Yale MFA graduate who studied under Albers and Rand, began work in the late 1950s that basically invented the wayfinding language of the modern airport we all know today, from color-coded terminal routes to the standardization of carrier name displays. She died last year at 93.

Poster by Jacqueline Casey promoting coffee hour at MIT's Ashdown Dining Room, red background with eight geometrically stylized cups with black coffee

Jacqueline Casey, poster for Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1979

99-year-old Dick Van Dyke dances to the new Coldplay song, "All My Love"

Mary Tyler Moore breaks down during the eulogy in the legendary Chuckles Bites the Dust episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show

What a wonderful thing that the new Coldplay video and the eulogy scene from Chuckles Bites the Dust showed up in my feed the very same day

You can get Hyperfixed here:
www.hyperfixedpod.com

Button reading ASK ME ABOUT OUR DIARRHEA-INDUCING CHILI CHEESE FRIES!

I really enjoyed the latest episode of @agoldman.bsky.social's new podcast, Hyperfixed. But am I crazy or is this show, and maybe half the podcast world, just building on the template (and tone) that @starleekine.bsky.social created 10 years ago with the late, great, 6-eps-and-canceled Mystery Show?

Every once in a while I refer back to something I posted on the "old, old Design Observer" (to use ‪@danielgray.com‬'s term, i.e., c. 2005-7) and if I have the time I read the comments. I'm always struck by how measured and thoughtful and fun they are, with so many people participating

"A new biography about an old reliable, Bill Zehme’s 'Carson the Magnificent' harks back to an era when doom and scroll were biblical nouns..."

Nice one from @alexandrajacobs.bsky.social in her review of the new Johnny Carson bio

Paul Rand, proposed brand update for Ford Motor Company, 1966

Segregated restroom doors at a service station marked "Ladies," "Men" and "Colored"

South Carolina, 1965

The short-lived TV variety show "Pink Lady & Jeff" is impossible to describe here, so just listen to the amazing podcast produced by @evanchung.bsky.social for Slate's Decoder Ring. I love everything about this: the 80s typeface, the desperate copywriting, the random guest list bit.ly/3OldwwR

👋

And it has the long letter that high school kid wrote to Kubrick that he said was the best analysis of 2001 ever

Roadside America Take a journey along U.S. main streets, byways, and highways through photographs taken by John Margolies between 1969 and 2008. We’ll be continuously adding images from the Margolies archive of more t...

Mike, try John Margolies’s photo archive in the Library of Congress flic.kr/s/aHsm4GsudP