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In today’s marketplace, “authenticity” has become a buzzword that brands strive to embody. Consumers will tell you they are drawn to companies that appear genuine, transparent, and aligned with their personal values, and brands are certainly paying attention. However, the concept of corporate authenticity is complex and often misunderstood. While it seems easy enough to decide whether a person is authentic and honest (which does not imply we are good at it), it is rather more difficult to attempt to judge a corporation on whether it is true to itself or lives up to its values. Unlike individuals, corporations are open systems with diverse stakeholders, making the pursuit of authenticity a challenging endeavor. The impression or view a collective of individuals may hold on them represents less in the form of a tangible or concrete reality, and more in the form of an urban legend or story. As Yuval Harari notes, corporations are shared mythsPeugeot is not a car, it is a story. In line, research shows that we often anthropomorphize brands, attributing human characteristics to them. This tendency is encapsulated in Jennifer Aaker’s seminal work on brand personality, which identifies five dimensions: sincerity (think Patagonia, known for its environmental activism and ethical sourcing), excitement (Red Bull, with its adrenaline-fueled branding and extreme sports sponsorships), competence (Toyota or Microsoft, projecting reliability and expertise), sophistication (Chanel or Rolex, evoking elegance and luxury), and ruggedness (Jeep or Harley-Davidson, built around toughness and adventure). These categories help marketers craft emotionally resonant narratives, but they can also misleadcreating the illusion of consistent, humanlike traits in organizations that are, in reality, anything but unified or coherent. The Pitfalls of Virtue Signaling Indeed, assigning brands personalities also sets them up for moral scrutiny. Once a company claims to be sincere, competent, or sophisticated, it invites consumers to hold it accountablenot just for performance, but for being honest in what it claims, and doing what it says. Thats where things often fall apart. Take the example of punk beer brand BrewDog. In 2022, the company launched an aggressive advertising campaign to distance its beers from the human rights abuses associated with the World Cup, even promising to donate sales of its Lost Lager to fight human rights abuses. But the story became more inconvenient when it emerged the company had a partnership with a distributor in the Gulf, and would continue to show World Cup matches in its pubs. As it turned out, the road from punk rebel to self-serving hypocrite turned out to be rather short. On the other hand, Targets recent decision to double-down on its commitment to DEI despite the growing list of multinationals (including Meta, McDonald’s, Ford, Walmart, Amazon, Harley-Davidson, and Disney) deemphasizing or halting their existing DEI programs, appeared to trigger a consumer backlash (at least according to its CEO). Then there’s H&M, which promoted a Conscious Collection to highlight its commitment to sustainability, only for watchdogs and NGOs to uncover greenwashing practices and ongoing exploitative labor issues in its supply chain. While consumer perceptions of insincerity may not always be fair or reliable (and there will never be a shortage of social media trolls praying on any corporate decision, including the decision to not say or do anything about anything), the fact remains that if you make a claim to be responsible or ethical, it is only a matter of time before consumers start looking under the hood to see whether your actionsand your political spendingare aligned with what your firm says it cares about. In the digital age, where every claim can be fact-checked and memed within minutes, performative values are not just ineffectivetheyre often self-handicapping. Is This Brand for Real? A Consumers Guide to Authenticity If you’re wondering whether a brands values are more than just marketing spin, here are a few practical ways to find out: 1. Is the cause connected to what they actually do?Brands are most credible when they support issues tied to their core business like a bank promoting financial literacy, or a food company addressing supply chain working conditions. If the cause feels random or like its chasing headlines, thats worth questioning. 2. Is the message matched by meaningful action?Look beyond the ads. Are they investing in real change, or asking you to do all the work? If a brand promotes sustainability but spends more on ads than actionor emphasizes consumer behavior over their ownit might be more about optics than impact. 3. Are there big gaps between claims and criticism?Compare what a brand says with how its covered in the press or watchdog reports. If theyre celebrating progress on diversity or climate, but facing lawsuits or fines in the same areas, thats a red flag. No brand is perfect, but consistency matters. 4. Who owns the topic inside the company?Real commitment goes beyond marketing. If sustainability or DEI is led by senior leadership and tied to company performance, that suggests seriousness. If its buried under PR, it may be more about image than impact. 5. Are they transparent about whats not working?No company gets it right all the time. But the best ones admit mistakes, revise targets, and explain why. Honesty is often more powerful than perfectionand its a key sign that the values are real, not just rehearsed. 6. Do they walk the talk politically?Some brands say one thing in public and back different things behind closed doors. If you care, tools like OpenSecrets.orglet you see whether a companys donations and lobbying match their stated values. The Role of Leadership Brand authenticity must be cultivated from the top down. Leaders set the tone for organizational culture and values. When executives embody the principles they espouse, it reinforces authenticity throughout the organization. Conversely, a disconnect between leadership behavior and corporate messaging can undermine credibility. That said, we should also acknowledge a sobering truth: we will never truly know whether a leader is authentic in the sense of being true to their internal values. Self-knowledge is hard enough for individualslet alone for those interpreting others from a distance. But, as one of us (Tomas) argues in a forthcoming book, Dont Be Yourself: Why Authenticity is Overrated and What to Do Instead, that kind of inner authenticity may not be what matters most anyway. What matters is whether leadership behaviorregardless of motiveresults in positive, prosocial outcomes. Are decisions advancing the well-being of employees, customers, society, or the environment? If so, perhaps we shouldnt care whether the driver is conscience or capitalism. To put it bluntly: we don’t need leaders to be saintswe need them to behave decently, even if theyre doing it to protect the brand, preserve investor confidence, or attract talent. In fact, many of the best corporate decisions are made precisely because they’re strategically ethicalnot because the CEO had a moral epiphany during their morning meditation. Sure, there are rare and admirable cases where executives have chosen the harder, more ethical path even when it hurts profits (Target, as mentioned above)pulling out of exploitative markets, paying fair wages despite pressure to cut costs, or refusing to greenwash in favor of slower, more meaningful change. But those leaders are exceptions. We should appreciate them, not expect them as standard. Disregard of decency Still, even in a world where profit is king, some companies stand out not for their lack of idealism, but for their flagrant disregard of decency. These are the firms that exploit labor, abuse data privacy, pollute freely, or thrive on addictive productsnot incidentally, but as a matter of business model. Whether or not their leaders are being “true to themselves” is beside the point. What matters is that theyre consistently making the world worseauthentically or otherwise. In this light, corporate authenticity should be judged not by introspection but by impact. Not by consistency with internal values (which are often opaque), but by observable behaviors, externalities, and the lived experiences of stakeholders. Or to put it differently: if your authentic self is toxic, exploitative, or unethical wed rather you fake it. And heres the punchline. The most responsible organizations today are often the ones that dont fetishize authenticity, but instead institutionalize accountability. They build feedback loops, audit their culture, measure ethical risks, and reward good behavior even when its not performative. In other words, they focus less on being real and more on doing rightwhatever the motive may be. Pretend Responsibly: Why Corporate Authenticity Is About Impact, Not Essence Kurt Vonnegut famously noted that We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. The same warning applies to companies. In todays hyper-transparent, hyper-skeptical world, brands are in a constant state of performancetelling stories, signaling values, curating identities. But heres the rub: those performances shape reality. The way a company chooses to present itselfsincere or performative, strategic or self-expressivewill influence how it treats people, how it allocates resources, and how it responds when the spotlight moves on. So yes, corporations must be careful what they pretend to be. Because the story becomes the strategy. The persona becomes policy. And even if the motive is opportunistic, the consequences are real. Corporate authenticity is not about soul-searching or storytellingits about alignment and accountability. If a companys public commitments match its operational decisions, if it treats people decently even when no ones watching, if it chooses to mitigate harm instead of maximizing plausible deniabilitythen its doing something right, regardless of how authentic it feels. To be sure, it is preferable to do the right thing for the wrong reasons than the wrong thing for the right reasons! In short: dont ask whether a company is being itself. Ask what kind of self its choosing to performand whether that performance is making anyones life better. In the end, the best brands arent the ones that feel most authentic. Theyre the ones that behave responsibly, or at least manage to mitigate, if not avoid, bad behaviors relative to others.
Category:
E-Commerce
On a Tuesday last fall, Michael Bierut was sitting in his living room in Tarrytown, New York, about 25 miles away from where he’d typically be on a weekday afternoon at any point over the previous few decades. Bierut, 67, had just stepped back from his role as partner at Pentagram, the storied graphic design studio that has shaped the branding for many of the world’s most important companies, and he was feeling restless. Its been disconcerting for me, Bierut said as we spoke with a view of the Hudson River sparkling from the window. He noted that the rest of Pentagrams partners were currently on an annual retreat in an undisclosed location. This was the first time he hadnt attended. Im a really black-and-white person. I have two speeds. I do a lot, or I don’t do it at all. For most of his career, Bierut put on a suit and tie, took the Metro-North train from the suburbs to the city, and went to work. Now, he goes to the Flatiron office once a week in his new role as a strategist at-large, where he acts as a part-time consultant on retainer to his fellow partners. Bierut plans to use the rest of his time writing, teaching, and working on independent projects. He has a few ideas for design books. Bierut has spent the better part of four decades running at full speed. He is responsible for some of the worlds most recognizable logos, including those for Mastercard, Slack, Verizon, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. He shaped the industry from one centered on auteurs executing their creative vision into a more pragmatic and professional ecosystem of work by advocating for the field in business. He launched one of the first design criticism blogs, Design Observer, and is the author of a best-selling design book. He is, by many measures, a celebrity inside of the insular graphic design world, where his approachability and generosity have won favor in an industry thats often fueled by ego and big personalities. If you say who are the famous graphic designers in the world, Michael will probably be in the top five depending on who it is that you speak to, if not No. 1 every single time, says Aron Fay, a former designer on Bieruts team. Bierut has built a career out of being a good guy with great ideas. He is like the nice guy finishing first in a way, says Britt Cobb, another longtime designer on his team. But now, Bierut says, its time to step aside for a new generation of design leaders who can usher the industry into a new, and more complicated, era. It’s a telling bookend to a fruitful career that has been driven by unrelenting focus, work, and ambition. I had this funny combination of insecurity and bravado, Bierut recalls of himself at the start of his career. Everything seemed to be affirming that my suspicions were correct that I was the best designer in the world. [Photo: Aaron Richter for Fast Company] 66.5 years old A few years ago, Bierut received an omen in one of the least mystical forms imaginable: a prepaid business class envelope from the IRS. It was his social security notice. The letter said hed be fully vested at 66.5 years old, which happened to fall on leap day 2024. He took it as a sign to retire. A very typical-for-me thing, he says. Longtime Pentagram partner Paula Scher remembers when Bierut told her of his plan. He told me he was leaving on the specific date that he had made up, that had all kinds of significance between when he joined, or something with Dorothy, his wife, she says. I thought, Oh, you’re crazy. You’re never going to do that. Scher was half right. Ultimately, Bierut couldnt quite quit. He came back with the strategist at-large idea, which Pentagram partner Abbott Miller says offers a new model for retiring partners to stay on with the group. He’s a solo agent in this new model, which is fantastic for us because the alternative is that somebody just steps aside and leaves with all of that intelligence and history, says Miller, adding that the firm previously defined a partner as someone who ran a team. In the past, it’s been an unceremonious goodbye. [Photo: Aaron Richter for Fast Company] Bierut describes Pentagram as a little like Saturday Night Live: the cast changes, but the show goes on. Even before his quasi-announcement, hed been feeling like it was time to pass the torch. Bierut, who is known for filling composition notebooks with early sketches of his designs, had started to feel a gap between his core ideas and the most contemporary modes of executing them. He rattled off half a dozen of his fellow partners. All of them can do things that I cant do, Bierut says. They have a facility with tools, a more nimble way of thinking with technology. I can do thingscommunicate in the ways humans dobut in terms of really realizing things, they make leaps that I cant make. Bierut has always conceptualized his ideas with pen on paper; he never made the switch to computers himself. Now AI is further revolutionizing industry work, and the ability to execute digital and motion graphic brand iterations is table stakes as identities become more diffuse in online spaces. He recalls that in annual work presentations with partners, I went from feeling like an iconoclastic prodigy to feeling like I was heping up the same old stuff. Bierut says his new role allows him to focus on his strengths, which center on ideas rather than execution. His approach has earned him a unique legacy in the world of contemporary design. He is a descendant of modernisms masters like Massimo Vigenelli, and a mentor to scores of young designers. This has made Bierut a connective tissue between designs old guard of iconoclasts and a new cohort of design leaders, many of which came up under Bierut at Pentagram before leaving to start their own studios. When he made the decision to pull back from Pentagram, he called a few senior team members like Cobb and Tamara McKenna, and then told the rest of the team. Theyd recently all gone to a screening of American Graffiti for Bieruts birthday, and he referred to himself as the townie character driving around with the high schoolers the night of graduation. He didnt want to hold on for too long. He was nervous about sharing the news. I was sort of like a one factory town, and Im announcing the factory is shutting down, Bierut recalls. He gave his team members a years notice, helped them secure jobs elsewhere, and diverted his big clients to fellow partners. And then, the all-or-nothing guy found himself in liminal space. Work for International Design Center, 1987-88. [Image: courtesy Vignelli Center for Design Studies/RIT] Ohio born Bierut was born in Garfield Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, in 1957, and grew up in nearby Parma. His mother, Anne Marie, was a housewife, and his father owned a business selling printing presses. He has twin brothers, Ronald and Donald. Bierut was an introverted kid. I used books the way people use phones these days, he says. The idea of going somewhere without a book was the most terrifying idea ever had. But he had an innate artistic talent, and by high school used his skill as a way to get involved in other things that interested him, like theater and music. As a teenager, he discovered books by Milton Glaser, Armin Hofmann, and Neil Fujita. I wasn’t fit to be on stage, he says. But if I would do the poster, I could go to the cast party. In 1975, Bierut enrolled at the University of Cincinnati. Yale-trained Professor Gordon Salchow, who previously taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, had just overhauled its design program in the style of the modernist Swiss Basel school. One of Bieruts professors, Joe Bottoni, remembers Bierut as having an innate talent. He had it in him, Bottoni says. We just gave him the opportunity to express it. The departments mandatory work-study program brought Bierut to the East Coast for the first time in 1978 with a summer internship at the Boston public broadcast station WGBH. The office, led by designer and Yale professor Chris Pullman, was a high-octane place with a diverse client roster and a casual chumminess that would go on to shape how Bierut cultivated his own team at Pentagram. It was only three months, but it really changed my life, Bierut says. The station was at that time on a growth trajectory to become the largest supplier of content to PBS, according to Pullman, and had about 400 employees. Pullmans team of about 10, including Bierut, handled design for the organization’s slew of national programming, including Carl Sagans Cosmos, which was seen by more than 500 million people. After three months, Bierut planned to return to Ohio to finish college and to his fiancé, Dorothy. But first, he made a stop in New York City. Tom Sumida, Bierut’s WGBH supervisor, had mentioned earlier that summer that one of his Yale MFA classmates, Peter Laundy, just got hired at Vignelli Associates, the iconic New York firm led by the famous designer Massimo Vignelli and his wife, Lella. This caused some chatter in the officenot from Bierut, though, who only had a vague sense of the firms reputation. Even so, when Bierut and some friends took a week-long trip to New York at the end of the summer, Sumida told Bierut to look Laundy up. Standing at a grimy New York City pay phone, Bierut pulled a note covered in names and phone numbers out of his pocket, dropped some coins into the slot, and rang Vignelli Associates. I was fairly shameless, Bierut recalls. I was in New York for a limited period of time and I thought, I’m going to make the most of this. Laundy said he was too busy to see him but he could drop off his portfolio. Bierut left his portfolio to be reviewed. The next day, Bierut was back in the lobby of the Vignelli office in hiking boots and a flannel shirt to retrieve it. I looked like I had rolled off the back of a pickup truck from rural Ohio, he says. The Vignelli offices. [Photo: Luca Vignelli/courtesy Vignelli Center for Design Studies/RIT] He gave the receptionist his name. Suddenly, bounding around a corner comes Massimo Vignelli himself, followed by Peter, remembers Bierut. Massimo starts pumping my hand with such enthusiasm and saying things like, So this is the kid. This is that Cincinnati kid, right, Peter? and saying Your portfolio is fantastic. Vignelli and Laundy gave Bierut a tour. The whole thing happened so fast, Bierut remembers with palpable amazement. After some period of time that might have been 30 seconds or 20 minutes, I was standing there with my portfolio wondering what the fuck just happened. Vignelli offered him a job. He joined Vignelli Associates a year later, after he finished college. New York Bred Bierut moved to New York City in June, 1980 one week after graduation. Basquiat, Haring, Warhol: Times Square was still seedy. Punk reverberated in the East Village. The city was seemingly coveredwith a light dusting of cocaine. When I asked him about New York during that time, Bierut more or less shrugged at all this as not quite as exciting as the Studio 54 era New York of the 70s. Bierut (center) with Massimo and Lella Vignelli [Photo: Luca Vignelli/courtesy Vignelli Center for Design Studies/RIT] Vignelli Associates was at its peak when Bierut was there from 1980 to 1990. Vignelli was the industrys sun; modernism rose and set with him. Look to IBM, American Airlines, Bloomingdale’s, Knoll, and the New York City Subway system map and wayfinding and youll see the mark of Vignellis pen. Vignelli and Lella were strict believers in structure and an objective, rational, neutral design approach that anyone could interact with. They also used an extremely limited color and font system: white, red, and black; Helvetica, Futura, and Bodoni. Massimo began his career in Milan, which is close to the epicenter of modernism in Zurich. So he was very, very influenced by the Swiss graphic designers of that period, says Roger Remington, the former director of the Vignelli Center for Design Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Bierut eventually chafed against that rigidity, but first, he thrived. Work for the Architectural League of New York [Images: courtesy Vignelli Center for Design Studies/RIT] He clearly was the golden boy in the Vignelli office, recalls Rosalie Genevro, the former executive director of the Architectural League of New York, who first met Bierut as a Vignelli Associates client in 1985. Bierut designed all of the Leagues graphics, and the pro bono client moved with him to Pentagram in 1990. (He passed the League work to partner Eddie Opara upon his retirement.) The Vignelli offices. [Photo: Luca Vignelli/courtesy Vignelli Center for Design Studies/RIT] I remember thinking at Vignelli that I was a bit of a prodigy, Bierut told me at his home in North Tarrytown, where he and his wife moved to in 1984. And I was unbelievably ambitious. I would be given the most trivial thing in the world to do, and I would stay up all night to do 20 versions of it for Massimo to look at in the morning. He adds, I just couldn’t believe that I had this job. I was very conscious of the fact, also, that most of the time I didn’t quite know what anyone was talking about. In one such instance, he had to assemble catalogue materials for an Architectural League of New York exhibition and call up a bunch of famous architects to make sure they sent their work on time. He didnt know who any of them werebut at least that made it easy for him to strong arm, say, acclaimed architect Peter Eisenman into meeting a deadline. But Bierut felt the contrast of his relatively pastoral Midwest background against the Ivy League milieu, and it pushed him to become even more ravenously curious, close the knowledge gap, and prove he could cut it. A concept sketch and final for a 1981 Skyline: The Architecture and Design Review cover [Images: courtesy Vignelli Center for Design Studies/RIT] Bierut deeply admired Vignellis passion, integrity, and deep convictions about design as a potential force for good in the worldthat design was inherently a public-spirited gesture. By the end of his decade at Vignelli Associates, Bierut had become its vice president of design and taken over as president of the professional organization American Institute of Graphic Artss (AIGA) New York chapter. But a curiosity about other ways of doing things nagged at him. I knew I was successful at Vignelli because I got the principles, Bierut says. But I never thought it was the only way to design something. It was just the way Massimo liked to design, right? I’m a good mimic, but you’re not going to base your life on mimicry. Or I didn’t want to, at least. The early Pentagram years The question came over a plate of steak frites in a dimly lit restaurant downtown. Would he join Pentagram as a partner? Like many of the designers Bierut hired to join his team whom I spoke to, he knew of Pentagram before stepping foot in the place. He wouldnt have guessed hed be considered for the job. But when partner Woody Pirtle asked Bierut if hed consider joinig as a partner following a talk Bierut gave at the firm, he played it cool and said hed think it over. The renowned San Francisco designer Michael Vanderbyl, a friend, recalled Bierut asking him to dinner to get his opinion on the move. I said that yes, he should, because he could emulate Massimo so well, and I was anxious to see what he could do on his own as a designer, Vanderbyl says. I encouraged him to do it. I could have been the heir apparent [at Vignelli Associates] I assume, so I had a decision to make when I was 33 years old, Bierut says. Do I want to do this forever or do I want to try something new? Just as when I was 66 years old, I had the same decision. Do I want to do this forever? Do I want to try something new? Bierut accepted the position. Now, he was autonomous. There was no one to tell him who to fire, how much to work for. Like everyone at Pentagram, I pictured how it would be, and its never the way you picture it, Bierut says. Its really independent. He described himself as unmoored and a little scared and excited during the early days. He began building a team, securing clients, and finding his own identity. He started wearing a suit and tie. He became a member of the social club the Century Association, which Mark Twain described as the most unspeakably respectable club in New York, according to its website. Posters for Yale School of Architecture, 2000-2019 [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] Pentagram, founded in London in 1972, is one of the most prestigious international design firms in the world. Following a generation of mid-century firms named after one design hero, like Vignelli Associates, it operated instead as a design consortium of partners who run their own teams and budgets, secure their own clients, and carry their own weight. No matter each partner’s profit and loss at the end of the year, revenue is shared equally. It is built to be a melting pot of ideas, due to its unique structure. Disney, IBM, Coca-Cola, Citibank, SNL, FIFA: Its hard to capture how broad its portfolio is across global civic, corporate, and cultural institutions. Pentagrams work is elemental to the way people interact with the world. Bierut was one in the first wave of second-generation partners who joined the firm, along with Michael Gericke, Jim Biber, and Scher. He helped founding partner of the New York office, Colin Forbes, who was also president of AIGA at the time, beef up Pentagram into the industry heavyweight it is in the United States today by building a roster of large, attraction-getting corporate clients, which complimented the cache-garnering cultural client roster Scher fostered. The firm started to gain attention as a group. Bierut built a reputation for consistently delivering results (though hes not without his critics). Brooklyn Academy of Music identity, circa 1995[Photo: courtesy Pentagram] Youve seen the work for his biggest clients: the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Saks Fifth Avenue, Verizon, Mastercard, the New York Jets, PayPal, Slack, Benetton, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), Sesame Street, as well as myriad New York City institutions like the MTAs OMNY card system, Central Park Conservancy, Governors Island, St. John the Divine Cathedral, the Architectural League, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). He’s probably one of the strongest examples of that kind of . . . split that we have between the importance of great work and economic strength, Miller says. If you can picture the logo for any of these, know that it probably germinated as a rough pencil sketch from Bierut’s head put to paper in a classic composition notebook (of which hes filled more than 100 that now line a shelf above his desk), or on the computer monitor of a designer on his team. [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] Bierut has a seeming ability to conjure an idea like a rabbit out of a hat that lends him an aura of mysticism. In reality, his iterative, in-the-moment ideation process came from Vignelli, who sketched ideas out in real time during client meetings. But without that peek behind the curtain, the skill confounds people. We would leave the meeting, and he would show me a sketch of a logo or an idea like, This is what they need, says Armin Vit, a designer on Bierut’s team from 2005 to 2007 who now runs design firm UnderConsideration. The sketches were gnarly, like scribbles, but the essence of what we ended up with weeks or months later was there. Fay recalls Bierut proposing a solution for Verizon on the car ride homea gradient checkmark. He’s like, Oh, I think we should consider doing this. Which speaks to the genius of him. He sort of had fully conceptualized the thing after 10 minutes of sitting in a room with them. Bieruts project mix has included pro bono work like for the Architectural League, and small spot illustrations for four-figure payouts, up to larger contracts in the five and six figures. His way of working has helped him retain long-term clients in his roster, like Genevro, who has been with him for decades, as well as corporate clients like Verizon, which brought in six figures over a multi-year contract. (Turner Duckworth rebranded Verizon in 2024.) Scher described Bierut as very profitable, and noted hat the firm lost a profitable partner when he changed roles, although she declined to cite specific figures. Miller also declined to share specifics. Finding his own style It took time for Bierut to shake off some of that Modernist puritanism and develop his own, more humanist aesthetic. I used to think his design was the least interesting of the Pentagram group in those early days when he was part of it, says Steve Heller, a former New York Times art director and author of more than 100 design books. I thought he retained a little too much of Massimo’s austerity. . . . He just had to find his voice, and his voice has always been more diverse than some of the others. [Photo: Aaron Richter for Fast Company] In his tidy home office, among white built-in bookshelves filled with design books and just behind his Eames lounger, Bierut has a framed quote by the artist Chuck Close that reads, Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. His team gifted it to him in the 2010s. The quote also opens his 2015 book How To. Its a useful artifact to understand how Bierut thinks. He doesnt see design as an absolute or stylistic ideal. Unlike fine art, its not a medium for self-expression. [Photo: Aaron Richter for Fast Company] This makes placing Bierut within design history difficult to do. There are some graphic inspirations, sure, like Fujita or Hofmann. But to really trace his design style, you have to turn to an architect: Ero Saarinen. Saarinen, who died in 1961, designed JFKs TWA Flight Center (now a hotel), the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the CBS Building in New York, and the GM Technical Center in metro Detroit. None of them look much like each other. Bierut describes Saarinan as a journeyman, who felt you had to find the right style for the job, and he takes inspiration from this positioning. According to Bierut, the design style is always, What would make sense for this particular thing? Saks Fifth Avenue branding, 2007 [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] But Bierut does have a few stylistic tells. He returns again and again to black and white compositions and simplified, big graphic moves, which he often iterates, multiplies, remixes or cuts off, as was the case for his 2007 Saks Fifth Avenue rebrand, which rotates and crops a contemporized version of its classic script logo into 64 squares. MIT Media Lab had a core black and white logo with some 40,000 permutations. (Bierut says its the one icon designers really fetishize.) Or his long-running, conceptually diverse, black-and-white Yale Architecture poster series, which Scher, Heller, and Miller all cited as among his best work. Michael is this incredibly conceptual thinker, says Miller. He has a reputation as an incredible strategist and corporate identity person, but he thinks in this very deep way about the issues of scale and typography. A poster Bierut designed for the Architectural League of New York in 1999, which shows a nearly full-bleed black circle with the teeny tiny word scale in its bottom right exemplifies this, according to Miller. Its a quick study in wit. What all his successful projects have in common is a simple, clever, hook. He might kill me for saying this, but there’s no one logo that Michael did that you like as the epitome of logo design, Vit says. But there’s so much work that is so consistently good at a level that is always appropriate, it’s always well-executed, it’s always relevant. . . . That’s what’s most impressive. Scale for Architectural League of New York, 1999 [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] Graphic design is a pas de deux between the written word and image. What got me into graphic design originally was about words more than anything else, Bierut notes. For him, corporate identity design, or branding, as its often known today, is a visual expression of problem-solving. Branding system for MIT Media Lab [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] I remember thinking, design training has a way of refining your sensibility to the point where you’re attuned to things that most people aren’t aware of; where youre doing work at registers that are going to be barely perceived by people; kind of working the math of really small differences and all these things that you’re going to be really picky about, he says. I always remembered, my mom wouldn’t know the difference between any of this stuff. And for certain things I was doing, my mom was the audience. The Design Dad Bieruts team remembers him as uncommonly generous with his time, even though, in their words, he wasnt particularly available, and generally doled out time in minutes, not hours. We sort of lovingly would refer to him as being Design Dad, Fay says. [Photo: Aaron Richter for Fast Company] Bierut typically hired designers after they had a trial run as interns. In design you have strong-minded people, and I was really fortunate that I seldom had to hire full-time designers who I didn’t already know, he says. This also had a side effect of creating cohorts of people who were all around the same age and over long hours and takeout, became friends. He looked for people who had innate curiosity and interest in all of the ins and outs of a project, and then he gave them outsized responsibility. At the start of a project, he would assign one designer as the leadsomething he learned from Vignelliand guide them through the initial decision-making about the design concept and direction. From there, he handed off basically everything leading up to a client presentation, with his guidance when needed. I dont have to sit at their desk and help them pick a typeface, he says. In the early days, Bierut often returned from a client lunch with a logo or identity scribbled on a napkin and handed it to someone to execute, according to Agnethe Glatved, a designer on his team in the early 1990s. In later years, more experienced designers recalled him as being less prescriptive. Generally, he allows designers to run with the idea from start to finish, build it out, lead it, and that helps build their confidence, former Pentagram employee Talia Cotton says. That helps make them feel like they’re creative and they’re being heard. The one-on-one relationship between a designer and clients also created a self-running system based on institutionalized trust that allowed Bierut the time to move on to the next project, and leave the office for client and new business meetings, with a shared understanding that his team would deliver. You look back and you see all these patterns, Bierut says. Massimo would travel a lot. Hed give me a project and go to Milan and would come back in two weeks and say, Hows it going? Every partner has a way of working that I suspect has root in how they came up in design. [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] The model required long hours from a high-energy twentysomething hire who could work independently and be married to the job. Many designers I spoke with said a typical workday ended between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., or later. They ordered dinners to the office. The team often worked weekends, not because Bierut explicitly required it but because of the caliber and quantity of work they were responsible for. Everyone is scared that they’re gonna fuck something up and as a result of fucking up, ruin Pentagram’s reputation, and as a result, their career, says Cobb. So that magic makes people work really, really hard there. Michael never has to motivate anyone. Signage inside The New York Times building [Photos: courtesy Pentagram] In the early years, Bierut was often away at meetings, and his team members could tell when he found Wi-Fi because theyd all start getting emails. Whenever he was in the office, thered also be a long line of people waiting to get his ake on their work so they could keep going. Even so, former team members remember him as extremely present and encouraging. Occasionally, if he spotted a really killer design on a monitor, hed slow clap from partners row, a second floor overhang where all the partners sat, or loudly announce You did it! And in an industry where personal, artistic investment can fuel decision-making, he remained relatively even-keeled. There’s no screaming, urgency, there’s no bloody consequences. We’re in it together, recalls former team member Jennifer Kinon of the work culture he built. Pentagram is structured in such a way that forces attrition, as designers there hit a growth ceiling unless they become a partner, which is rare. So when the time came to move on, the learned self-sufficiency of the Bierut team created a diaspora of independent design studios: Champions Design, Cobbco, Order, Cotton, Fay, and Franklyn are just a few founded by his former team members. Even in their own firms, several designers I spoke with said they ask themselves to this day, What would Michael do? All this has made Bierut into a father figure in the design world. Both Order founder Jesse Reed and Fay recalled car rides home from meetings. It felt like you’re with your dad, says Reed. He would play the Talking Heads and have his sunglasses on. He would start singing in the car. Bierut once described the Vignellis as surrogate parents, and though he shifted uncomfortably in his seat when I asked him about being thought of as a design dad, its that quality of trust, pressure, and generosity that helped build such a strong alumni network in a new generation of designers. Its also similar to how Massimo and Lella’s son Luca Vignelli described Bieruts relationship with his family: He was like a second son for my father, and as a graphic designer more similarly spiritually attuned, so I guess that made him a sort of adopted brother to me. The client whisperer Bieruts alumni consider him to be an unflappable client whisperer. I’ve seen him do presentations where he hadn’t seen the most recent version of the deck, says Hamish Smyth, a former team member who now owns the design studio Order with Reed. Sometimes in the beginning they were printed out on paper still, he’d flick through the papers for like, 30 seconds. Okay, got it, and then just go in and crush the presentation. . . . You’ve got people sweating, preparing for these things for days, and he would just come in. He has this natural oratory ability.” Smyth recalls a real estate client that came into the office several times to review their proposal on screen. They couldnt get approval. So Bierut suggested going old-school. They printed dozens of logos on 12-by-12-inch sheets mounted on boards and wrapped in paper like Vignelli used to do. Bierut presented one-on-one with the CEO. And the horse and pony show worked. (Bierut, however, didnt recall this.) Bierut presents as familiar and approachable, sometimes code-switching based on the client, as Cobb recalls was the case in the casual tone he took to defuse tensions with the many native New Yorkers who were MTA stakeholders for their OMNY project. Reed recalls leaving meetings with a luxury real estate group white in the face, as they threw money at them to try to get the work on faster timelines. Bierut was unfazed. Reed recalls him saying, Can’t we just do the thing that we signed up to do and get paid to do that and then deliver and have a good day? Verizons logo design was the easy part, according to Fay. Everything that came after that was really challenging and really political, he says. He recalled really disproportionate demanding timelines, in which tons of employees asked one or two people from Bieruts team assigned to them to crank out work. Michael was really great at setting boundaries with the client from the outset about what we’re going to deliver to you. [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] He also had an unrehearsed approach to presenting. He just treats people like people and that’s his best trait, says Reed. He started to show you he had a form of generosity about another person’s point of view, says Scher, who recalls him using baseball analogies with male clients, because that was a relatable form of communicating design decisions. I’ve never once sat in with Michael on a meeting and thought, ‘he is blowing smoke up these people’s ass,’ says Cobb. (Bierut did, however, write an essay on the art of bullshit.) But for all his generosity, Bierut does like to talk. He recalls coming out of a meeting with founding partner Colin Forbes when hed just started at Pentagram. He gently put his hand on my arm and said, I’ve got one bit of advice for you. I leaned down and he said, Don’t talk so much. I went completely red. I was horrified. I was so eager to please everyone that any bit of criticism just felt like an anvil on me. But he was right. The way I ended up shifting that was by saying you don’t learn anything by talking, you learn by listening. Bierut accepts that clients are people, and people are complex. Pushing your way through doesnt solve for that. They’re successful, so there’s something they’re really good at doing, but whatever they’re good at doing isn’t this, or else they wouldn’t have called for help, he says. It feels like all of a sudden they’ve abandoned the world of business and they’re somehow in the world of black magic, you know? NYC MTA “WalkNYC” campaign [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] He compares a slide deck to a Rorschach test. They’re all ready to unload whatever their hopes, fears, dreams, nightmares are onto these shapes, colors, and forms you’re showing them. Ultimately, the key to working with clients is understanding how to deal with people, and tha there’s no one way to prevail, says Bierut. One of the reasons I love being a designer is that I love clients. I don’t have a love-hate relationship with clients. I often say even the clients that I hate, love me. People don’t vote for logos It was 2014, and Bieruts phone was ringing. This in and of itself wasnt unusual. Bierut, then in his fifties, had already been a partner at Pentagram for nearly 25 years. The name carried notoriety. And so, calls were expected. But this circumstance in particular was a bit strange: It was Hillary Clintons presidential campaign. They needed a designer to craft the campaigns identity. Would he help? Youve seen the final result as part of hundreds of millions of dollars of political advertising during her 2016 campaign: on yard signs, in digital ads, and at the end of swing state commercials. The design has gotten its fair share of criticism, but its also a good representation of Bieruts approach. The concept is simple and clear, with a clever play on visual elements, like much of his work: a sans-serif capital H, comprising two vertical lines and a forward arrow. Hillary equals forward progress. (A sort of design that I like to do is blunt and obvious, he noted in 2016.) [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] The first time that Bierut met with Clinton, he recalls telling her that people vote for candidates who they think can improve their lives. They don’t vote for logos. Instead, it acts as a signature, according to Bierut. It gives people a thing to coalesce around, mak[ing] sure that when your messages are going into a complicated, crowded environment, people can tell what you’re signing off on, and that they know it when they see it. The identity project, code-named Hi-C, was secretly developed with assistance from Reed and advice from Miller. His former team member, Kinon, was the campaigns design director responsible for its distribution. The identity had an easily understandable concept and workhorse framework that made it adaptable and participatory. But its tight corporate style irked many people in the face of Trumps bombastic approach to campaigning. Critics saw the arrow as inadvertently symbolizing a move toward the right, rather than forward as intended. [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] We all know how that turned out. After Trumps win, the work led to both real backlash and reckoning about design’s efficacy, at a moment when conversations about the power of design were at an all-time high, and the industry pushed design as a secret weapon for solving deep-seated problems of all kinds and design thinking as good business. Critics saw the campaign branding as responsible for her loss. Donald Trumps graphics were easy to dismiss, Bierut wrote in 2017. They combined the design sensibility of the Home Shopping Network with the tone of a Nigerian scam email. Like so many other complacent Democrats, my only question was: Why is this even close? Of course, broader foundational political, cultural, and social issues also factored into the loss. Long-standing, foundational agreements of American politics were shifting, along with party coalitions. Insatiable grievance proved to be a winning idea. Design cant overcome people’s fears and prejudices, says Scher. It just can’t do that messaging. It can to a degree, but you find out that people live in their own communities and that the breakthrough can be very different unless you’re selling something universal, like soap. I asked what hed say to those who felt the branding was responsible for Clintons loss. Assuming those people are graphic designers, I would say for most of my life I’ve shared your exalted view of the power of graphic design to change the world, he says. I think it can change the world in many cases. I’m not sure this is a moment where the right logo or the wrong logo would have made a critical difference. If he feels guilty about one thing, he says, its using what was successful for Obama as a model. The introduction of a logo, designed by Shepard Fairey, was a first for political branding, and marked a clean corporate approach Bierut followed, based on one initial. I never made that case explicitly, but I think in the background that was sort of a set of expectations that I didn’t question clearly enough. But Bierut is used to criticism, and seems to consider it part and parcel of working in the public sphere. There are people that think it sucks, but in what we do, some things become famous, some become infamous, he says. You can just do the best you can do. Slack identity [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] For as outwardly self-deprecating and humble as Bierut is, since early in his career hed pined for the design industry to get the same attention as other cultural pillars like movies. He considers his push to makegraphic design part of the general zeitgeist his most significant impact on the industry, work hes largely done as a writer, speaker, and industry advocate completely outside his role at Pentagram. All along, even when people were criticizing things that I had doneand I got a lot of criticism for things I’ve done over the yearsI remember thinking, I asked for this. I was dying for people to notice that I had done a logo for a presidential campaign or changed the logo of a big telecom company or changed or updated the logo of an online workplace communications platform, he says referring to Verizon and Slack, which he developed after the Clinton logo. Now two-thirds of them seem to hate it, maybe even more, he says. But that was what I wanted. I wanted people to notice it and so people were talking about it. A new role to play I met Bierut again on a Tuesday afternoon in April in Pentagrams most recent office on Park Avenue. The office was full of young designers sitting at Apple desktops, quietly clicking away, and milling around between meetings. The firms newest partner, Andrea Trabucco-Campos, met with designers in Bieruts former conference room. Partner Matt Wiley was in conversation with another partner, bent over papers splayed across a conference table in another room. Bierut has a small built-in desk next to partner Michael Gerickes, by a built-in bookshelf filled with books from his collection over the decades, including a designer encyclopedia his wife Dorothy gifted him in the 70s. Hed given up his larger desk when he became part-time. Aside from Luke Hyman, the other partner desks were empty, but there was energy in the air. As we made our way around work stations, Bierut introduced me to partners and stopped to sit next to a designer who was formerly on his team, and was working on an identity hed passed to Trabucco-Campos. He loved the work she was doing and wanted me to see it, so we sat down at her monitor and she walked us through the concept. Bierut gushed. And even though he said the partners had gotten more deliberate about what he took on since November to keep him part-time, as we moved through the office, colleagues constantly stopped him, shouted for him, and consulted with him. Aging creates an interesting tension because it involves both constancy and change. For Bierut, aging has shifted the way other people perceive him over time. First you’re like a kid in the room who no one’s expecting to talk, Bierut says. Then there’s a moment where someone like Massimo Vignelli turns to you and says, Michael, why don’t you explain the idea behind this one? Then, you become the same age as your clients and you take big swings, then a steady, big brother figure, and then, in a horrifying moment, you remind your team of their dad, he says. And you have to find a new role to play. But Bieruts sense of self has been consistent. He recalls noticing how hed aged on video calls during the pandemic. It’s funny because in your head you’re the same person, you haven’t changed, he says. I feel like I’m exactly the same person I was the first day I sat down to work at Vignelli Associates in 1980. Hes still essentially driven by the same motivations as when he dropped coins in a payphone 40 years ago. As Bierut wandered the office floor, he had a conversation across the room about building architecture related to a project he was helping with. Someone stopped him to show off a magnetic lip gloss case design in development. He pushed back a meeting due to our interview. In some sense, upon retirement, it seems his team just got a whole lot bigger.
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Within apartment complexes, workplaces, and courtrooms, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have forcibly detained more than 50,000 people in the first six months of 2025. These people, some of whom were reportedly detained for matters as trivial as a single missing form, find their lives abruptly uprooted as they are transportedsometimes thousands of miles across the countryto large-scale ICE detainment facilities, which are primarily located in the South and on the East Coast. ICE currently holds more than 48,000 detainees, though the agency only has funding to support housing for 41,500. Despite that overflow, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller now want ICE to ramp up arrests to 3,000 per dayand private prisons stand to benefit. Taxpayers are expected to shoulder the cost of this potential expansion, but the money won’t just go to the government: The majority of ICEs 113 detention facilities are not government-run. More than 90% of immigrants arrested by the agency are held in private detention centers, most of which are operated by just two companies: Geo Group and CoreCivic. Aerial view of the Geo Group-run Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington [Photo: David Ryder/Getty Images] Private prisons occupy a controversial place in the criminal justice system, said Bob Libal, a senior campaign strategist at the Sentencing Project. Beyond general discomfort with the idea of profiting off of incarceration, reports have also questioned safety and security, citing higher incidences of assaults, theft, and contraband in private facilities than those operated by the Bureau of Prisons. Despite their controversial status, private prisons have long been a part of the immigration landscapeand their role is only expanding as the Trump administration makes sweeping changes to immigration policy and enforcemen The start of the Private Prison Industry The first modern private prison, Libal says, was CoreCivics Houston Processing Center, which opened in 1984 as a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and later ICE, detention center. Four years later, cofounder Thomas W. Beasley told Inc. that CoreCivicthen known as Corrections Corporation of Americacan sell prison contracts “like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers.” Houston Police arrive outside the Houston Processing Center during a protest on October 11, 2014. [Photo: Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle/Getty Images] Although federal contracts were a part of the private prison industry from the beginning, it was a 1996 law that cemented their place in the criminal justice system. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 required commissioners to consider buying or leasing existing facilities before building new federal detention centers. In the 30 years since this law passedand particularly since the post-9/11 formation of the Department of Homeland Security and ICEfederal contracts have become the industrys primary growth driver. Last year, federal contracts made up 52% of CoreCivics total revenue and 62% of Geo Groups, much more than the revenue received by state and international contracts. The federal government never built their own capacity, said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice and author of Inside Private Prisons. They relied on these companies to do that. A Growing Partisan Divide Federal reliance on private prisons grew substantially under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but there has been a sharper partisan divide in the industry in recent years. Presidents Obama and Biden each passed legislation to phase out private prisons during their terms. The Obama administration worked toward ending all private prison contracts except those undertaken by ICE, and the Biden administration vowed not to renew any private prison contract. These measures, later rescinded by the first and second Trump administrations, responded to safety and security concerns in private facilities, where differences in contracts and levels of oversight mean standards can vary not only by company, but by facility. A guard escorts an immigrant detainee from his segregation cell back into the general population at the Geo Group-run Adelanto Detention Facility in California in November 2013. [Photo: John Moore/Getty Images] It makes it very easy for there to be a pass the buck situation, said Jennifer Ibaez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center, noting that government agencies awarding contracts may not have enough presence in private facilities to identify problems, let alone address them. Reports about ICE denying basic medical care to detainees have filled the news recently. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student detained in March, said her asthma attacks worsened after not receiving adequate medical care or opportunities to access fresh air while in detention. Similarly, Maria Isidro, a Florida resident detained during a routine check-in with immigration officials, has been shackled and denied medication for her diabetes in an ICE facility in Texas. We really dont have a full sense of the scope of it, except for on the occasions that people are released by ICE and can describe to their community or to the media, Whitlock said. Still, these concerns and the legislation by Democratic administrations did little to stymie the industrys growth. The Geo Group, for example, has had relatively steady growth in its U.S. secure services sector, a part of the business including ICE facilities. That sectors revenue increased from $600 million to $2.4 billion between 2004 and 2023. A new era of Unprecedented Growth After Trump spent the 2024 campaign promising to initiate immigration crackdown (a deciding factor for many voters in the 2024 election), private prisons expect their growth to reach new heights in his second term. Both Geo Group and CoreCivic have disproportionately supported Republican campaigns in most election cycles, but in the last election cycle, Geo Group was also the first company whose political action committee reached its contribution limit donating to the Trump campaign. CoreCivics Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego [Photo: Carlos Moreno/Anadolu/Getty Images] Their loyalty seems to have paid off, with Geo Groups stock price surging from $14.18 to $25.36 during the week of Trumps election last year, and CoreCivic seeing a similar rise, from $13.19 to $22.52. Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger told investors on the companys first-quarter earnings call last month. Both CoreCivic and Geo Group also donated $500,000 to Trumps inauguration, which CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd told Fast Company was consistent with our past practice of civic participation, including contributions to inauguration activities for both Democrats and Republicans. The Geo Group-owned Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, California [Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images] The Geo Group did not respond to a request for comment, but has expressed its willingness to support the new administrations goals and has stressed the significance of Trumps immigration policies for the company. Weve taken several important steps in anticipation of what we expect to be significant future growth opportunities and related operational activity during 2025, Geo Group CEO J. David Donahue said on the companys Q1 earnings call last month. Private detention’s expanding impact Already, ICE has awarded a 15-year, $1 billion contract to Geo Group for a 1,000-person detention center in Newark, New Jerseythe first of several idle private facilities that may be reopened to accommodate the influx of detainees under Trump officials. Within a week of the reopening, Newark Mayor and gubernatorial candidate Ras Baraka was arrested for trespassing during a weeklong protest at the facility. His office previously filed a lawsuit, alleging the facility had not obtained proper permits before reopening. Tom Homan, Trumps border czar and a former consultant for a division of the Geo Group, has said the administration plans to increase the number of immigrant detainees from 48,000 to 100,000. Another boon for the private prison industry, given the average cost of around $165 per detention bed. In this time of transition, Geo Groups and CoreCivics stocks remain well above their preelection price, and concern among researchers and activists continue to rise. Every detention bed is a person whose life and family and community are likely to be impacted, Libal says. Its another story of somebody whos dropping their kids off at school who was picked up by ICE and now is in a detention bed.
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