Now You See It and Other Essays on Design

Design, a way to engage with real content, real experience

“Design is a way to engage with real content, real experience,” writes celebrated essayist Michael Bierut in this follow-up to his best-selling Seventynine Short Essays on Design (2007). In more than fifty smart and accessible short pieces from the past decade, Bierut engages with a fascinating and diverse array of subjects.

Essays range across design history, practice, and process; urban design and architecture; design hoaxes; pop culture; Hydrox cookies, Peggy Noonan, baseball, The Sopranos; and an inside look at his experience creating the “Forward” logo for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Other writings celebrate such legendary figures as Jerry della Femina, Alan Fletcher, Charley Harper, and his own mentor, Massimo Vignelli.

A partner at Pentagram Design’s New York office, Michael Bierut has won numerous awards, and his work is in the permanent collections of MOMA; the Metropolitan Museum; the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; and the Library of Congress. He is a senior critic in graphic design at Yale University.

Bierut’s longtime work in the trenches of graphic design informs everything he writes, lending depth, insight, and humour to this important and engrossing collection.