Swiss Miss + Michael Bierut = Creative Morning

2010/01 Michael Bierut from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

This talk happened several weeks ago, yet unlike many things these days it will remain relevant for weeks, months and years to come. This creative personality has the particular advantage of being positioned at a powerful company with a host of excellent clients, but even still his comments on the client/designer process seem prescient and basic to every professional relationship you may have.

He broke his lecture (his lesson) down into simple, bullet-pointed aphorisms that you can take with you and use to help curate and influence your own professional creative lives, and he expressed them with clean well-kerned Keynote slides, easy banter, and a humble yet authoritative voice. He has the authority of his stature backing up his simple advice, and it rang true for myself, and perhaps others in the wrought iron lilypad room at Galapagos. The simplicity of his message is also it's power, I think. It is not so groundbreaking, like telling someone to break up with an abusive boyfriend or girlfriend, but as in those cases, there are always excuses to stay with the abuser, as there are always excuses to stay with a bad client; the money is good, the project is almost done, there may be more work down the road, etc.

Since this lecture I have begun my adventure as a full-time educator, teaching in the Advertising Design and Graphic Arts Department at City Tech (CUNY's New York City College of Technology) and I will do my best to translate Bierut's advice to my students during my time as a professor, and as a colleague. Experience and accomplishment lend themselves towards being more selective, but throwing that out and making excuses for taking on bad jobs and bad clients only justifies more of the same.