iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Michael Bierut

Sarah Archer @sarcher.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The catalog for “Charley Harper: Creatures Wild and Tame” at the Cincinnati Art Museum is available for preorder and comes out next Tuesday! It includes essays by CAM curator Julie Aronson, @michaelbierut.bsky.social, Julie Zickfoose, and yours truly: www.rizzolibookstore.com/product/art-...

The cover of Charley Harper Creatures Wild and Tame showing a stylized polar bear’s face and with a cardinal perched on his head, yellow type on a glacial blue background.

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Reposted by Michael Bierut

Ray E. Boomhower @rboomhower.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

"No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices." Edward R. Murrow, who died on this day in 1965

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

Back in the 80s I had something on my nose & my wife said “I made an appointment for you to get that looked at” & it turned out to be Dr. Zizmor. Absolutely incredible scene in his office, standing room only waiting room and crazy manic

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

“Strange how potent cheap music is.” Noel Coward, Private Lives, 1930

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Born Slippy is one of the best needle drops in movie history

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Power is out on the east side of Cape May Point

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

Lots, but my three biggest "holy sh*t!" moments in a first-run movie theater were Diva (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981) The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988) and Blood Simple (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1984) At that last one, I left the theater, bought another ticket, and watched it straight through again

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

That prosecutor assigned by Jeanine Pirro who failed to get a single grand jury indictment against those six Democratic lawmakers last week has been mocked for having a side gig as a "dance photographer," but actually his pictures are rather nice stevenv873.smugmug.com

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

People can dismiss stuff like this as nothing more than charming and easy-to-do stunts, but it’s amazing that no one has thought to do them since LaGuardia. Having a mayor who actually seems to love his city counts for a lot

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Reposted by Michael Bierut

Jacob Bogage @jacobbogage.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

👀 What if I told you there was a hidden art gallery scattered across the country? What if I told you some of its treasures had vanished? What if I told you that I found them? A project three years in the making (🎁 gift link):

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The disappearing art gallery in your post office

The U.S. Postal Service is home to thousands of historic works of art in post offices nationwide. Hundreds have been lost, sold or destroyed.

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

That’s the song I’ve always associated with taking our firstborn to college; now I will have to think of potato chip farming 😢

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Vignelli's design was a collage of every immigrant community foreign language newspaper he could find in New York on a single day. State Dept officials reviewed the design, disapproved of some of the headlines, & demanded they be replaced. Vignelli refused, and the poster was never published.

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Massimo Vignelli, The Melting Pot, 1975 (rejected proposal to celebrate the US Bicentennial)

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

West Side Story > Romeo and Juliet Jesus Christ Superstar > The New Testament I really believe this

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

Boston-based art and design collective Silence Dogood takes its name from one of Benjamin Franklin's pseudonyms, and its typographic approach from Franklin's era of printing

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

The end credits for the season finale of #Severance were turned into a dazzling Saul Bass homage by the show's title typography designer, Teddy Blanks of ChipsNY

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

When exactly did Tork come out of nowhere and achieve a virtual monopoly in the paper products dispensing space? Just asking questions

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

When Amber Asay invited me on her podcast Women Designers You Should Know, I had one request: can we please do Jacqueline Casey, the in-house designer at MIT who brought European modernism to the USA one campus event poster at a time? women-designers-you-should-know.simplecast.com/episodes/jac...

Poster for Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design, designed by Jacqueline Casey, photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1982

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

That's a poster that Woody Pirtle of Pentagram did in 1988 for Amnesty International in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Woody died last Sunday at 81.

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

In "Final Cut," the book about auteurist director Michael Cimino's making of "Gates of Heaven," a production so disastrous that it practically brought down United Artists, there is a funny passage where they remember that the movie he really wanted to make was The Fountainhead

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Not yet! But not surprised by the F-head influence. Rand picked architecture as the subject explicitly because it sat at the intersection of so many things: art v business, vision v compromise etc. And movie directors like to think they occupy that same position.

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

Not the first time someone has rewritten your 2012 story, not plagiarism but in an ironic way a demonstration of the basic thesis

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Yes, I clicked on "The interview that made me want to quit my job" and could not for the life of me see what the point was. Now we know, I guess

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

TIL that Adrian Brody's mother is the legendary photographer Sylvia Plachy

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

I just adore an all-type book cover. Here are three favorites from Matt Dorfman's annual Ten Best list in the New York Times Book Review, by Arsh Raziuddin, Chantal Jahchan and Na Kim www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/b...

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Lester Beall with Charles Goslin, The Connecticut General Style Book and Some Notes on Typographic Design for the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, 1958. Images from the amazing thisisdisplay.org

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Doggett's papers have just been made available to researchers at Yale's Haas Family Library library.yale.edu/news/papers-...

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Jane Davis Doggett, a Yale MFA graduate who studied under Albers and Rand, began work in the late 1950s that basically invented the wayfinding language of the modern airport we all know today, from color-coded terminal routes to the standardization of carrier name displays. She died last year at 93.

Terminal routing signs at Houston International Airport

Standardized United Airlines branding at Tampa International Airport

Doggett and her wayfinding plans for Jacksonville International Airport

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Jacqueline Casey, poster for Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1979

Poster by Jacqueline Casey promoting coffee hour at MIT's Ashdown Dining Room, red background with eight geometrically stylized cups with black coffee

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

What a wonderful thing that the new Coldplay video and the eulogy scene from Chuckles Bites the Dust showed up in my feed the very same day

99-year-old Dick Van Dyke dances to the new Coldplay song, "All My Love"

Mary Tyler Moore breaks down during the eulogy in the legendary Chuckles Bites the Dust episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

You can get Hyperfixed here: www.hyperfixedpod.com

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

I really enjoyed the latest episode of @agoldman.bsky.social's new podcast, Hyperfixed. But am I crazy or is this show, and maybe half the podcast world, just building on the template (and tone) that @starleekine.bsky.social created 10 years ago with the late, great, 6-eps-and-canceled Mystery Show?

Button reading ASK ME ABOUT OUR DIARRHEA-INDUCING CHILI CHEESE FRIES!

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Every once in a while I refer back to something I posted on the "old, old Design Observer" (to use ‪@danielgray.com‬'s term, i.e., c. 2005-7) and if I have the time I read the comments. I'm always struck by how measured and thoughtful and fun they are, with so many people participating

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Nice one from @alexandrajacobs.bsky.social in her review of the new Johnny Carson bio

"A new biography about an old reliable, Bill Zehme’s 'Carson the Magnificent' harks back to an era when doom and scroll were biblical nouns..."

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Paul Rand, proposed brand update for Ford Motor Company, 1966

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

The short-lived TV variety show "Pink Lady & Jeff" is impossible to describe here, so just listen to the amazing podcast produced by @evanchung.bsky.social for Slate's Decoder Ring. I love everything about this: the 80s typeface, the desperate copywriting, the random guest list bit.ly/3OldwwR

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

And it has the long letter that high school kid wrote to Kubrick that he said was the best analysis of 2001 ever

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Name a show you’re positive no one remembers but you.

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

BTW Jerome Agel is somewhat of a mystery man. He "coordinated" and seems to have conceived McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage, as well as "producing" I Seem To Be A Verb for Buckminster Fuller and The Cosmic Connection for Carl Sagan, plus 40+ other books. No Wikipedia page, no NYT obit.

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Michael Bierut @michaelbierut.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. That meant going to a movie theater. Afterward I was obsessed, but no rentals, no streaming. Just feverish memories. Then I found this paperback book, not a quickie exploitation play but a 368-page, dense-packed treasure trove, edited by Jerome Agel. Price: $1.50

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