The contributions of a graphic designer, from ‘No Parking’ signs to Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bags
ENLARGE
If you’ve managed to avoid a parking ticket lately, you may have Michael Bierut to thank for your good fortune.
Mr. Bierut, a graphic designer, and his company, Pentagram, are behind the simplified “No Parking” signs that began popping up during the Bloomberg administration.
For those who don’t remember, though it would be hard to forget, there was a time when parking signs were a study in confusion. The cynical among us could have been persuaded they were intentionally baffling, prompting us to park in the wrong place, incur traffic citations and do our small part to replenish New York City’s coffers.
“We were called to figure out how to make it cohere,” by the city’s Department of Transportation, Mr. Bierut recalled of the signage assignment. “We said all the type would be one size, except the hours. Red is usually telling you places you can’t park. Green is where you can park. All flush left,” because that’s the way people read things, such as books. “Before, it was all centered.”
That clarity and logic, not to mention the “No Parking” signs themselves, are on display at an exhibition of Mr. Bierut’s work. The show, at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, wraps up Saturday.
Indeed, the signs are but a small part of the graphic designer’s contribution to the texture of New York City.
His projects have included designing Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bags, rebranding the New York Jets and creating signage for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—“Thou Shalt Not Poop” in gothic typeface to encourage four-legged visitors and their owners to respect the cathedral’s grounds.
“There’s something about achieving a level of ubiquity, and people are unaware of it,” Mr. Bierut said modestly as he led me through the exhibition, which is part of the School of Visual Arts’ annual “Masters Series.”
ENLARGE“Every parking sign,” he added, “looks the way it does because of some decisions we made in our office—about the font, and the size of the font, and what would be in what color.”
Another of the graphic designer’s assignments for New York City are analog “wayfinding” maps. You may have seen in them in the subway, at Citi Bike locations and at express-bus kiosks.
Such maps may sound redundant in an age when most people carry smartphones with GPS.
Then again, how often do you emerge from the subway, without any sense of whether you’re heading north or south? And your mobile device doesn’t help.
“People actually have very inconsistent mental images of what New York City consists of,” said Mr. Bierut, whose team went out and interviewed pedestrians for the mapping project. “They put New Jersey to the east. They exaggerate the size of Manhattan. They put Brooklyn and Queens on separate islands.”
What? You mean they aren’t?
Mr. Bierut, 57 years old, grew up in suburban Cleveland and moved to New York in his mid-20s, going to work for the great Italian designer Massimo Vignelli.
Vignelli was perhaps best known locally for an extremely elegant 1972 version of the subway map. The effort nonetheless drew criticism because stations weren’t necessarily in the right places and a landmark such as Central Park was almost square, rather than rectangular, as it is in real life.
ENLARGE“Late in life, he never called it a map; he called it a diagram,” Mr. Bierut said in defense of his mentor, who died in 2014. “In a way that map,” meaning his wayfinding map, “is a bit of an homage to the work” that Vignelli did in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Including using Helvetica, the typeface that has become synonymous with the transit system’s signage and that Mr. Bierut also uses in his maps.
But what distinguishes Mr. Bierut’s art is that it almost always seems at the service of simplicity, of getting the client’s message across in the fewest possible steps.
That ethos travels all the way down to business cards, such as the one he designed for Fern Mallis, a fashion-industry figure credited with the creation of New York Fashion week.
Ms. Mallis, who happened to drop by the show during my visit, showed me her card. It had only her name—in yellow highlighter—email address and mobile phone number.
“Graphics is about communicating and a lot of graphic designers forget that,” Ms. Mallis said. “Michael never loses sight of what the core objective is.”
—Ralph.Gardner@wsj.com