Exit Interview With Michael Bierut

Michael Bierut is one of the best known designers in America. You probably interact with a design from Michael and his team every day. Like the Verizon V checkmark, or the logos for Yahoo! and Slack.

Or redesigns for brands like Mastercard, Saks Fifth Avenue and the New York Jets. Michael even designed the logo for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

But before all of that, in 1985, Michael Bierut was 27-years-old, and early in his career. He was working at a firm founded by legendary designer Massimo Vignelli. One day, Michael was handed an assignment that seemed pretty straightforward. The International Design Center of New York had two events coming up, and they wanted Michael to create the invitations.

“One was gonna be an exhibition of what they thought of then as ‘avant-garde furniture’,” says Bierut. “Then the other thing was a lecture by some scientists from NASA from the space program, who were experts on designing interiors and things for people to use in outer space.”

Michael started thinking about the two invitations. But then, his client made a change that threw Michael for a loop. It turns out, the Design Center didn’t have enough money to pay for separate invitations, and the invitations had to be combined. Now, Michael had to figure out a way to advertise these two very different events on the same sheet of paper.

Ultimately, he came up with an inspired way to solve the problem. He would make the invitation reversible. He drew an invitation that looked, one way, like a coffee table with a vase on top, and like a rocket ship taking off when it’s flipped upside down.

Even now, forty years after this invitation was created, Michael Bierut still loves talking about it. Because it was the beginning of a long line of clever, innovative designs he’s created over his illustrious career.

In 2025, Michael Bierut announced he was stepping away from his role as a partner at the design firm Pentagram. And now, he’s entering what he calls his “semi-retirement.” Michael has been on 99% Invisible before, back in 2017, to discuss logo design. And on the occasion of his semi-retirement, we’ve invited him back, to talk about his career, his design philosophy, and some of the most interesting trends in graphic design, including the branding for Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York City.