As a senior in high school I was required to do an internship in a field that I may want to pursue. I landed an internship with Wondrack Design. My mentor, James Wondrack worked with the AIGA chapter for Upstate NY. He brought Micheal Beirut in to speak at RIT and I was invited to the lecture.

At this point in my life I’d never heard of Micheal Beirut or Pentagram Design. I had taken some graphic design classes in my high school art department. I liked them and after interning at Wondrack Design learned a lot more about the ins and outs of working in the field. I was pretty sure it was something I wanted to pursue but I hadn’t had that moment yet where it just slaps you in the face and you realize that it’s definitely the right path. That all changed after hearing Micheal Beirut speak and present his work. Some of the pieces were just so clever (maybe even genius) and I suddenly understood what it meant all those times my high school art teacher told us that design is about problem solving.

To this day I still would credit both my mentor and Micheal Beirut for inspiring me to go into graphic design. In college I had the chance to visit Pentagram in NYC and then after school I was able to work with another Pentagram partner Woody Pirtle which was another invaluable learning experience.

I recently came upon this video from Behance of Beirut speaking and once again found myself inspired. I love the part where he talks about not being creative. He says the reason he became a designer is because he wanted people to come to him with problems to solve. This is exactly the reason why I am a designer and not a painter, illustrator, sculptor, etc.

About This Presentation
Renowned graphic designer Michael Bierut claims that he’s not creative. Instead, he likens his job to that of a doctor who tends to patients extracting a handful of simple lessons (e.g. the problem contains the solution; don’t avoid the obvious) at the foundation of brilliant design solutions.

About Michael Bierut
Prior to joining Pentagram in 1990 as a partner in the firm’s New York office, Michael Bierut worked for ten years at Vignelli Associates, ultimately as vice president of graphic design. His clients at Pentagram have included The New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue, The Council of Fashion Designers of America, Harley-Davidson, The Minnesota Children’s Museum, The William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, Mohawk Paper Mills, the New York Jets, Princeton University, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Morgan Library and Museum.

He has won hundreds of design awards and his work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Montreal. His commentaries about graphic design in everyday life have been heard nationally on the Public Radio International program “Studio 360″ and his appearance in Helvetica: A Documentary Film is considered by many that movie’s funniest moment. Michael is a co-founder of the weblog DesignObserver.com, and his book 79 Short Essays on Design was published in 2007 by Princeton Architectural Press.