By Matt Chaban 1/08 3:55pm

Street Fighters Too

Michael Beirut, streetscape chauffeur. (Twitter)

Sign Language: Michael Bierut Dissects His New Parking Signs

Michael Bierut is one of the most renowned designers in the world. As a principal at Pentagram, he has created logos, identities and campaigns for everyone from United Airlines to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Citibank to New York and The Atlantic, Saks Fifth, Princeton and Yale, even Walt Disney and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, for which he designed an updated “doomsday clock.”

Still, one of the greatest typographical minds of our time could never make sense of the city’s parking signs.

“On the occasions I drive and try to park on the street, I tend to get as confused as anyone,” explained Mr. Bierut, who lives in Westchester and normally takes Metro-North into the city. “I have received many tickets and been towed twice. I am so paranoid now that I will park in a garage for even a 15-minute errand.”

Perhaps now he can start parking on the street again. Read More

By David Foxley 4/20/07 3:37pm

A Life in Letters

Fifty years ago, in Switzerland, two gentlemen designed something so revolutionary that it would symbolize an era—literally. Their creation, the Helvetica typeface, became so pervasive in the second half of the twentieth century that few people paid it any attention at all. But that’s exactly the point. To celebrate the semi-centennial of Max Miedinger and Read More