Michael Bierut is a partner in the New York office of the international design consultancy Pentagram. Bierut began his career with the legendary designer Massimo Vignelli. In over 35 years of practice, he has worked for every kind of client imaginable, from professional football teams to academic research laboratories. He was elected to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 2003 and was awarded the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in 2006. Two years later, he was named winner in the Design Mind category of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards. A teacher at the Yale School of Art and a co-founder of the Design Observer website, Bierut is the author of Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design and the co-editor of the five-volume series Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design.

This is a monograph, manual and manifesto by one of the world's leading graphic designers. Protege of design legend Massimo Vignelli and partner in the New York office of the international design firm Pentagram, Michael Bierut has had one of the most varied careers of any living graphic designer. The 35 projects Bierut presents in this book illustrate the breadth of activity that graphic design encompasses today, his goal being to demonstrate not a single ideology, but the enthusiastically eclectic approach that has been a hallmark of his career. Each project is told in Bierut's own entertaining voice and shown through historic images, preliminary drawings (including full-size reproductions of the notebooks he has maintained for over 30 years), working models and rejected alternatives, as well as the finished work. Along the way, he provides insights into the creative process, his working life, his relationship with clients, and the struggles that any design professional faces in bringing innovative ideas to the world. Inspiring, informative and authoritative, How to...is set to be the bible of graphic design ideas.