A Quote by Michael Bierut

Simplicity, wit, and good typography.

Michael Bierut

Quote Topics

Good Simplicity Typography Wit

Quote Author

Michael Bierut
Graphic Designer
Born: 1957

By wit we search divine aspect above, By wit we learn what secrets science yields, By wit we speak, by wit the mind is rul'd, By wit we govern all our actions; Wit is the loadstar of each human thought, Wit is the tool by which all things are wrought.

Robert Greene

There's a simplicity in typography that demands absolute accuracy... the only way you can experience it is by doing it, and you can't do it on a screen because a screen never gives you the entire picture.

Bruno Maag

Typography needs to be audible. Typography needs to be felt. Typography needs to be experienced.

Helmut Schmid

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity - I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.

Plato

In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. It's other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

Robert Bringhurst

Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty.

Emil Ruder

You can do a good ad without good typography, but you can't do a great ad without good typography.

Herb Lubalin

Discipline in typography is a prime virtue. Individuality must be secured by means that are rational. Distinction needs to be won by simplicity and restraint. It is equally true that these qualities need to be infused wiht a certain spirit and vitality, or they degenerate into dullness and mediocrity.

Stanley Morison

The Great slight the men of wit, who have nothing but wit; the men of wit despise the Great, who have nothing but greatness; the good man pities them both, if with greatness or wit they have not virtue.

Jean de la Bruyere

The better people communicate, the greater will be the need for better typography-expressive typography.

Herb Lubalin

There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the quaintness of wit.

Alexander Pope

Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild; In Wit a man; Simplicity, a child.

Alexander Pope

Typography is a hidden tool of manipulation within society. All schools should be teaching typography; we should be fundamentally aware of how typographic language is forming out assholes.

Neville Brody

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.