A Quote by Michael Bierut

Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.

Michael Bierut

Quote Topics

Design Fact Fiction Graphic Graphic Design

Quote Author

Michael Bierut
Graphic Designer
Born: 1957

Graphic designers should be literate in graphic design history. Being able to design well is not always enough. Knowing the roots of design is necessary to avoid reinvention, no less inadvertent plagiarism.

Steven Heller

I've been working on a graphic about carbon emissions. It's an incredibly simple graphic - a bunch of blocks and a table below it - but it's taken me three weeks to design. For some reason it just wasn't working. Then finally I realized there was a number present, which I was rendering in each version, that wasn't necessary for the understanding of the piece. This figure was getting in the way and distracting from the main flow of the narrative. As soon as I pulled that graphic out of the design, it sprang into focus. Suddenly it worked.

David McCandless

In my book "Sound Unbound" we traced the guy who actually came up with the main concept for the graphic design of the record cover sleeve. His name is Alex Steinweiss. And one of the things in my book that we really tried to figure out was the revolution in graphic design that occurred when people put images on album covers.

DJ Spooky

When I was working at the game company, I wasn't just doing graphic design, I was doing the entire product management, so I would do the graphic design, I would create the advertisements, even the catch copies. I would figure out what kind of packaging and design of the packaging, so I was basically doing total product management at that time.

Makoto Shinkai

I don't see myself as an artist. I work with artists and collaborate with them, but then it becomes graphic design. It's not an art. I'm a graphic designer.

Vaughan Oliver

Design is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take.

Chip Kidd

My undergrad degree was in graphic design, and I don't work in that anymore, but I obviously do a lot of design and editing and Photoshopping, and the Adobe Creative Cloud is essential!

Franchesca Ramsey

Many people think that being a graphic designer means going to an expensive art school and buying expensive software that will cost you thousands of dollars. This is so far from the truth. There are hundreds of online education centers that offer top-notch graphic design training.

Fabrizio Moreira

The Hewitt sisters were these amazing - both sort of philanthropists and dilettantes who went out and single-handedly collected all of these of-the-moment designs in wallpaper and textiles and in graphic design in order to teach people about design.

Jake Barton

Fashion is everything. Art, music, furniture design, graphic design, hair, makeup, architecture, the way cars look - all those things go together to make a moment in time, and that's what excites me.

Tom Ford

What is said determines who listens and who understands. Graphic design is a language, but graphic designers are so busy worrying about the nuances - accents, punctuation and so on - that they spend little time thinking about what the words add up to. I’m interested in using our communication skills to change the way things are.

Tibor Kalman

Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we [Europeans] shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.

Jean Baudrillard

Graphic design is a hobby that I started with back in 2010-2011, which I am still doing today. And because of that, I was able to design my own stuff and designed my own logo.

Alan Walker

When East meets West, amazing design happens. L'Alahambra rug is a marriage of the clean line and simplicity of Western graphic design meets the complexity and beauty of Eastern pattern.