Michael Bierut (2013): Pentagram's inner workings, cultivating talent, and finding inspiration everywhere

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Hello again, everyone.
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It's good to be back.
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I have just been traveling a lot in the past few weeks, and we've been working on our September campaign with Charity Water, and so between those two things, we've not had a lot of time to focus on this show, but we're back at it.
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This is episode 12, and I think you'll agree with me that we're kicking things off in just a huge way.
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We've got Michael Beirut on the show.
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Michael needs no introduction, but I'll give you one anyways.
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He's been a partner at Pentagram for more than 20 years.
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Before that, he worked with Mamo Elli, he's won hundreds of awards.
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His work is in MoMA and other prestigious museums.
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He's done identity work, signage work, packaging work, and the list goes on and on.
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Michael, it really is an honor to have on this show today.
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Thanks so much for coming on.
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My pleasure camera.
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So I, I don't even know where to start.
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I mean, there's so many questions I could ask you.
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This is a show that's focused on finding and cultivating talent, which we'll get to, but, uh, I know very little about Pentagram.
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I've, I've not had the pleasure of working at a large agency like Pentagram.
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Can you tell me a little bit about the composition of Pentagram and what it means to be a partner there?
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Sure.
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Pentagram was set up back in 1972, so it's over 40 years old.
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I've just been a partner here for about half of its existence.
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Uh, when it was set up, the five guys to set it up, and that's where the name Pentagram came from, each ran their own at one point or another, freelance practice and came to enjoy and value and treasurer, in fact, the pleasures and the struggles of, um, operating independently, being the person who was solely responsible for the output of a small studio, having first hand contact with everyone who worked for you and everyone you worked for.
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On the other hand, each of those five guys had come to realize what the limitations of that setup could be.
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There's a limit as to, particularly back in the seventies when, um, it was difficult to scale in any way, except through more people and more equipment and more space.
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It was difficult for each of those guys to, uh, uh, take on jobs of a, beyond a certain scale, ha on jobs that were multidisciplinary, take on projects that might be, uh, you know, multinational or transcontinental or stuff like that.
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And they realized that if they threw in together and, uh, combined these separate freelance practices into a bigger organization, they might have a shot at doing bigger what they thought could be more interesting, more challenging work.
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And indeed, it's sort of came to be they made one critical decision when they joined together, which was that they decided not to elect one of the five as boss, and in fact, to keep it so that each of the five maintained, uh, their own separate teams within that structure.
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And their own authority within those teams remained the main point to contact with clients from the outside and the main point of contact for the people that worked for them so they could stay close to the works, close to the things that actually had gotten them into the business to begin with, and from which they were deriving, you know, pleasure every day.
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Turned out that that model they created 40 plus years ago was, uh, expandable and scalable that a six person could join, a seven person could join.
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One of the original five moved to New York.
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They started in London, one of the original five, moved to New York, set it up here in New York.
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And now 40 plus years later in 2013, we've got 19 partners, uh, working in five offices, eight partners working in New York.
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Eight partners work in London, and then one each work in three smaller offices that we have in Berlin, San Francisco and Austin, Texas.
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Each of those partners basically works in a way that aside from the, uh, electronic devices we have at our disposal would be completely familiar to those five guys back in 1972.
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Each of us has what amounts to is a fairly small staff, like a small studio would have.
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The biggest is probably a dozen people and partners can be really productive with as few as three or four designers.
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And each of us works out in the open.
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Each of us collaborates with the other ones when the situation requires it and works independently, when that seems to be the right thing with the project as well.
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There's still no hierarchy, there's still no boss among the 19 people.
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And anyone who's sort of seeking the head of my firm, pentagram, if they're talking to a partner, that person for that moment is in charge of that relationship and in charge of the, in charge of pentagram as far as that, uh, person's concerned, right?
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And so, and so, it's meant to sort of like preserve everything that people like about working at a small independent scale as a creative person with some of the advantages of working at a larger scale.
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We have access to greater resources, obviously the security that scale can bring to a certain degree.
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And, you know, if you're a sociable type of person as I am, it mitigates the kind of potential loneliness of being on your own, closing the door and just kind of feeling like, um, you know, I hope the phone rings where I hope, you know, I have to do something to distract myself.
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You know, there's plenty of distractions here if you, uh, if you seek them.
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So, so I've been a partner since 1990.
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When I joined, I was probably, I was certainly the newest partner, and that's one of the youngest, now I'm one of the most longstanding ones here and one of the oldest as well.
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So you get to see the whole transition going from, um, sort of a quasi prodigy slash naive to, uh, being kind of grizzled old man, which is what I am today.
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That's fascinating to me as an outsider.
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Pentagram I is in consists of those, those partners that you mentioned.
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Are there, is there any hope for those who are not at that level, the junior positions or even internships?
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Is there any side kind of structure like that at Pentagram, or is it mostly made up of senior level, uh, individuals?
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The
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Hierarchy is pretty simple.
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We don't have titles here in New York.
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The eight partners are the ones who really determine the direction of the office.
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And every project that's being done at Pentagram is happening with the direct involvement of one of those eight partners, sometimes more than one of those eight partners.
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Every creative employee here works was hired by one of of those a partners, and, uh, eventually we'll go in, most of them will go in to quit when they decide it's time to move on by telling one of those a partners the one that hired them.
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And so it's really simple.
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The appeal for anyone working here is that they're working directly with someone at the top of the organization because the hierarchy is simple.
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Unlike a lot of firms that have, you know, hundreds of employees in five different offices, most of our time with our designers is spent doing work directly for clients who tend to know us and know the designers.
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So it's kept really tight.
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Now, each of those designers, you know, is talented and ambitious.
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Most, almost all of them will start here at Pentagram, often as interns or just outta school and will leave having had what we hope is a great experience, but to move on to bigger, brighter things that probably exist outside of pentagram.
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A culture developed here that the firm could be kept most interesting by having new partners joined from the outside.
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So when I joined Pangram, it wasn't as, I wasn't like a junior designer at Pentagram who worked my up way up to a partner here.
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I was working at another firm, and, uh, when I decided that I was ready to do something else, they thought, well, maybe a partnership here would be of interest.
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You know, Paula Share who joined at the same time I did, would been running her own office with a couple of partners and decided that Pentagram model would be good for her.
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Abbott, Miller, Luke Haman, Emily Erman, Natasha, Jen, Eddie Par, all of them were running independent of things before they joined.
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There are a couple of exceptions.
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Michael Gek is one of the partners here in New York, was actually a, uh, designer, then a senior designer, then an associate partner, and then came a partner just because he knew the business so well and had put in the time here that, uh, it just was an irresistible choice.
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But of those 19, uh, current partners, only three of them came up through the ranks.
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Now, the one exception in the remaining 16 is our newest partner here in New York, Natasha Jen, who actually was a designer on Paula shares team way back at the beginning of her career, and, uh, then went on to work at a couple of other firms and then opened her own office and finally came back here as a partner.
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You know, we've been around long enough at this point that I think the idea of preserving a kind of very specific culture is very important to people.
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And that means that you sort of cultivate your own personnel from the inside, and you, um, you sort of like bring them up so that every single person who joins sort of like knows the firm inside and out.
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They made a really different decision here, and it was already happening when I joined, you know, 23 years ago, that the vitality of the firm would be best served by having it refreshed from the outside.
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And the trajectory changes every time someone joins from the outside or the time or any partner comes in, because every partner is sort of expected to behave in an entrepreneurial way.
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We each basically get our own business.
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We each manage our own accounts.
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We each call up clients who owe us money and try to find out when we're gonna get paid.
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There's no sort of like, you know, Mr.
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Pentagram or Ms.
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Pentagram who actually does that work for you.
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They sort of have a have to have a, an appetite for that and take it seriously if you're gonna succeed here as a partner.
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And so having people come from the outside, having demonstrated their own entrepreneurial bent somehow in some arena as an independent practitioner, has ended up being a good model for us.
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And I have to admit, it's kept it a really interesting place.
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The pentagram I joined back in 1990, obviously was a completely different place from the one that exists today, and it's because the partners that I joined, then all of them really retired, and then Paula joined, uh, six months after me.
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And the firm that I'm in now has really changed with these new partner coming in, and that's what keeps it exciting.
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I love it from that regard.
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Yeah.
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So let's talk about, uh, finding talent, design talent.
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Uh, I know you did an interview with Computer Arts not too long ago, and you talked about looking for three things in perspective, employees, intelligence, curiosity, and passion.
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Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
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I think that intelligence, curiosity and passion, if you picture what the opposites are, I don't imagine that anyone looks for dumbness, um, you know, dumb people who aren't curious about anything and act jaded and bored all the time, Although, I swear to God, if you're gonna bar with a lot of designers and not the dumbness part is sort of hard to abide.
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But I think a certain amount of jaded San Freud is sort of actually very much in the profile of, uh, what people fancy designers are like.
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I aim into that myself.
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I like people who are energetic, really passionate, and who really are ready to get interested in anything.
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One of the things about graphic design specifically that is really interesting and different from a lot of other creative professions and design professions is that, uh, graphic design is almost always about something else.
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You know, it's sometimes it's about design, sometimes, you know, it's, uh, a self contained, self-referential subject and audience, but usually a new assignment in graphic design is an invitation to throw yourself into another world, right?
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So I've learned, you know, about everything from, you know, avantgarde performance art to, um, the regulations that, uh, govern the way parking signs look in New York to, um, how the NFL approves changes to its uniforms, to the way that, um, you know, a major urban hospital admits patients to have, you know, cancer therapy.
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And that's all just by way of doing mundane things like logos or, you know, annual reports or websites or stuff like that.
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So if alls you're interested in is fonts and curing and resolving the white space and making something line up just the right way, all of which are really important things, by the way that you have to care about.
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But if that's all you care about, that won't sustain you, that won't get you through a late night be, you know, if you're not interested in what the words say and what who the audience is and why they're supposed to be interested in it as well.
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You know, the intelligence is what's required to make you a, um, a good active receptor to all this input you're gonna get.
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The curiosity is a thing that drives you to keep asking questions about it and keep, and it makes you ask those questions that I promise you they forgot to tell you the answers to.
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And those are the usually the answers you need.
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And then finally, the passion is the thing that'll keep you pushing at it until you get not just the answers you need, but until you can kind of transform that information into something that you personally find compelling and that the audience is gonna find compelling as well.
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There, you know, everyone has a different thing they look for in employees.
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There are people out there who just look for nothing but pure craft skills.
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And I, I, and I sort of take those for granted or something you can learn.
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You can't learn to be smart, you can't learn to be curious.
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You can't really, uh, learn to be passionate.
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Maybe you can, I don't know.
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But, uh, if I'm looking for inbred traits, those are the ones I like the best.
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Yeah, it really is hard to inspire someone to, well, not hard to inspire someone to be passionate, but to, to have them do that on their own and be to continue to be passionate throughout their career.
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I mean, it really has to come from inside that individual.
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Yeah.
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I mean, as an employer, I think you can model that behavior.
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And in fact, you know, I remember the first internship I had that really turned my head around was working for a brilliant, uh, designer named Chris Pullman, who was the design director at W G B H Television, the public television station up in Boston.
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And he put together an amazing group of people, of which I was the, I, there were two interns, and I was the junior intern there, and so I was like the lowest person on the totem pole by any measure you could have.
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But I just remember, I learned so much just from watching the behavior of everyone else there, how you actually, how much fun it could be to do stuff you're interested in how, how opinionated they were about the subject matter they were working with.
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You know, if one person was laying out a cookbook for Julia Child, another person was doing the ONA graphics for the big documentary they were doing about Vietnam, someone else was doing the title sequence for Masterpiece Theater.
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Those things weren't the sort of dry technical exercises that I was doing in school.
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People were throwing themselves in, like just had such facility and interest in, you know, what the plots for Masterpiece Theater would be the per, you know, Julia Child's personality as a human being and how you could express that with, uh, uh, the way you would deploy typography, what you knew about Vietnam, and how you could translate that into compelling graphics that a mass audience could enjoy.
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You know, that was a revelation to me.
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I had been moving dots around in squares back in school and kind of like just hand drawing, you know, characters, uh, in my typography class.
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And as you see people engaging with this bigger world with such a thrill, and I'm not not sure I would've gotten there on my own had I not seen those models.
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So I, I sort of take it back.
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I'm not sure you can't learn them.
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You just need to really, uh, be attentive to the examples you have around you.
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Yeah.
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So in addition to Chris, who have been your other mentors over the years,
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Great teachers in school back at the University of Cincinnati, Joe Batton, Gordon Southco.
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Great teachers there.
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Uh, Chris Poman was a great mentor to me.
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Of course, when I graduated, I moved to New York.
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My very first job was working for Mamo and Lela Vili who are legendary designers.
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And again, there I was the, um, lowest person on the totem pole.
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I did things every day at work that designers, no matter, no matter where they work now, would not even recognize as being related to design activities.
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They look more like janitorial activities, the kind of stuff I did there.
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And it wasn't because it wasn't only because I was, uh, very low in the tonal pole.
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It was also because design back then was a very analog activity that involved pouring, you know, benzene into rubber cement and stirring it until it had a perfect consistency.
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You know, we don't need, um, rubber cement anymore to do our work usually, but, um, there's a lot of that going on back in those days.
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And so, um, I was low on the totem pole, but again, to sort of see designers working at this unbelievably high level was revelation to me.
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Also, I had led a very provincial life up to that point.
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You know, I grew up in northern Ohio, went to school in southern Ohio, and I thought I'd gone around the world just by traveling on, uh, you know, I 71 from, uh, Cleveland to Cincinnati.
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Instead, Mamo Lela made references to designers from around the world to, you know, artistic or architectural experiences from around the world they had lived lives of, to me, astonishing, cosmopolitan sophistication.
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And, um, and I was just sort of a go.
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I just think just as I had been, uh, working at W GBH as an intern over a summer in the late seventies when I started working for MO in Lela in the early eighties, in addition to all the things I learned about design, I also learned about, you know, about food, about art, about architecture, about reading, about literature, just about how, how a civilized person could use design as a tool to explore the world.
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It was thrilling for me.
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It was intimidating at first, you know, And even when I think about it, not still sort of intimidated, I don't think, uh, I could hold my own with, uh, either the vis and even today, nearly, uh, 35 years later, but still, the things I learned in those days were on every level, not just about, um, typefaces.
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Yeah.
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If all of us could have had our first job with, uh, the VIGs mm-hmm.
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right outta school, you know, going back to what you said about intelligence, curiosity, passion, though, it's, it's wonderful to see the paths that all of us take and and where we get to.
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Yeah.
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And it doesn't require that we work with a VII or something like that.
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Absolutely not.
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When I'm interviewing people, I can tell sometimes I admire people that are ambitious and people that want to, that set their sights on certain targets.
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But it's an important thing to know that, that trust me, no matter where you are, no matter what, what your position is, that inspiration is available to you right there.
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It's right there.
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You don't have to move to New York.
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You don't have to work for some person, you imagine is a legend.
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I happen to be lucky, and I happened to have probably been hired nearly by accident.
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I don't think I was sort of like the guy that they were dying to get just because I, I certainly didn't, um, fit a profile of sophistication that I think that office actually deserved to, uh, have amongst this employees, even the low level ones.
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Instead, I, you know, I got there and I just sort of just started learning by paying attention.
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But that attention, if you direct it anywhere, you know, no matter where you're working, no matter who you're working for, no matter who you're working with, no matter who's working for you, there's inspiration and information to be had just so easily and even more easily.
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Now, remember, um, when I went to school and when I started that job, you know, I will now be an old guy.
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There was no internet back then, you know, and that means that a book or a magazine that say Mamo would have on his desk that I'd ask if I could borrow that was like treasure to me.
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You know, it was like information from far off places like Zurich or Milano or Tokyo or something now barely a person within the sound of our voices who can't, you know, access a million more things that I could have in those days.
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Right.
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And, you know, maybe it, maybe it's worth finding, um, you know, mentors you can serve as guides to help sort out or instruct you what all that stuff means.
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And I had that inherently I think by people who, you know, I mean, what was in masimo's trash can at the end of the day was probably more interesting than most stuff that I could find with a few clicks, um, you know, right from my desk.
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However, I think that the inspiration is always there.
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It's always, you know, where you look for it, where you find it and what you do with it after you've, um, turned it up.
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Yeah.
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It's a very different world today.
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Inspiration though is inspiration no matter where it comes from.
00:19:50.599 --> 00:19:51.039
Yeah, absolutely.
00:19:51.480 --> 00:20:01.160
Uh, our listeners can't see this, but I've been smiling the entire time we've been chatting cuz it's just so, it's so infectious to, to watch you and, and listen to you talk about, uh, what we do and, and it inspires me to be better.
00:20:01.220 --> 00:20:04.240
Let me ask you this maybe as our our final question.
00:20:04.759 --> 00:20:07.880
Um, as you look back over your life thus far, what are you most proud of?
00:20:07.880 --> 00:20:09.720
There's things I've done that I'm proud of.
00:20:09.721 --> 00:20:14.200
I'm proud of having designed things that, um, that some things that people see every day.
00:20:14.460 --> 00:20:22.279
You know, like a lot of parents, Dorothy and I have managed to raise three kids and I'm really proud of each of whom are under their own trajectories.
00:20:22.430 --> 00:20:25.358
Each of whom I think have engendered.
00:20:25.400 --> 00:20:27.759
We've engendered to kind of curiosity within them.
00:20:28.039 --> 00:20:29.319
This led them to very different paths.
00:20:29.559 --> 00:20:35.559
Not a single one of them is a graphic designer, so they haven't chosen to follow in my footsteps, but they're each being curious.
00:20:35.560 --> 00:20:50.319
And I think, you know, uh, to the degree that, you know, in my work life, you know, I've managed, I think to serve as a mentor to a lot of people who have worked for me over the years and also been inspired by them.
00:20:50.320 --> 00:20:54.680
Often, sometimes we, um, will look at a chart that someone made here in the office.
00:20:54.880 --> 00:21:03.079
It just shows kind of a, it's a list, it's sort of a bar chart of all the people that have just worked on my team since 1990 and it's gotten longer and longer.
00:21:03.180 --> 00:21:12.039
And, um, sometimes someone just worked from 91 to 94, sometimes they work from 94 to 98, sometimes they work from 98 to 2001, et cetera, et cetera.
00:21:12.049 --> 00:21:16.839
It all seems like yesterday to me, a lot of them have gone on to do amazing things.
00:21:16.980 --> 00:21:18.000
All of them.
00:21:18.108 --> 00:21:28.480
I sort of remember moments with them, things that they worked on where they made the, the design we were working on better through something that they knew how to do.
00:21:28.900 --> 00:21:51.240
And, um, in a way, one of the greatest things you can do, I think as a creative person is, you know, be both a receptor of all the inspiration that you acquire from the people who you've surrounded yourself with, but at the same time take that and turn it out to other people who then can multiply it out on their own.
00:21:51.240 --> 00:21:57.599
It's really, it's a great thing and it's sort of a, the kind of thing that not every profession affords.
00:21:58.029 --> 00:22:05.839
I love my dentist, but I sort of can't imagine that that sort of sense of exchange is happening, you know, in his practice as it is in mine.
00:22:06.720 --> 00:22:13.240
Nothing against dentists who are probably more important than designers actually to our wellbeing, but I think that's just such a, it's such a great thing.
00:22:13.240 --> 00:22:28.039
It's a gift and it's a privilege and it actually is such a great source of, of energy that it's part of the reason that I think so few people who do what we do end up kind of retiring and just planting flowers.
00:22:28.140 --> 00:22:35.519
You just kind of want, you get addicted to it and the better you get at it, um, if you're lucky, the more fun you can have doing it.
00:22:35.520 --> 00:22:43.640
And the more people who you can kind of count among your circle of those who you've influenced and those who have influenced you.
00:22:43.641 --> 00:22:46.480
And sometimes you can't even tell'em apart if you're doing it right.
00:22:46.710 --> 00:22:47.200
Yeah.
00:22:47.200 --> 00:22:53.759
Well, on behalf of that incredible community of designers throughout the world, thank you for everything you you're doing to make our world better.
00:22:54.680 --> 00:22:56.559
Uh, and thanks for taking time outta your day to come on the
00:22:56.559 --> 00:22:56.680
Show.
00:22:56.681 --> 00:22:58.519
It's been a real pleasure talking to you.