Michael Bierut is a legend in the design world. He’s done graphics for MIT, Disney and The New York Times. But the catch of this story isn’t his success, but what he once lived to regret.
In 1980, he was a young design student in Cincinnati. He spent his evenings downtown at the Contemporary Arts Center, hanging around the way some people do at bars – hoping something might happen.
Until one day, it did.
The centre was preparing an exhibition on theatre director Robert Wilson. It included drawings, designs, and artefacts from a career spent making gorgeous, bewildering art. Among them were pieces from an opera Wilson had made with composer Philip Glass, with the bizarre title: Einstein on the Beach.
This exhibition required a catalogue for visitors to carry through the gallery. Bierut was offered $1,000 to do the design, a near-mythic amount to him at the time. So he got straight to work.
There was only one small complication. He had never heard of Einstein on the Beach.
What he did have was material. Roughly five thousand words of text, forty or fifty images, captions, and the technical requirements of turning all of it into an object 8.5 inches wide, 11 inches tall, and no more than 64 pages long.
Faced with uncertainty and a deadline, he did what ambitious young designers are trained to do. He organised it.
He constructed a three-column grid. He selected a single type size. He arranged the images with care. It was a small monument to legibility, perfectly aligned and entirely defensible.
He collected his payment. Job well done.
***
Fifteen years later, Bierut found himself in a darkened seat at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The house lights dimmed, and what began was a revival of Einstein on the Beach.
The opera lasts nearly five hours. It unfolds without a conventional narrative; it feels less like watching a story and more like sitting inside a cyclone. Performers chant numbers and phrases that set and break hypnotic patterns. Music stacks and loops, and time begins to stretch.
Bierut himself later described the experience as “the most physically powerful, enthralling, hypnotic, immersive, over-the-top, intellectual and emotional and aesthetic experience you can have.”
Somewhere, looking back at those five hours in the dark, a thought arrived:
“I didn’t get one millimeter of this into that stupid catalogue.”
He had been handed something extraordinary, put it in a grid, and called it finished. And he began to feel regret.
***
Most of us know what it’s like to do this, even if we’ve never designed a catalogue in our life.
We’ve written on the birthday card for a colleague we barely know. Given meeting updates that said all the right things without understanding the detail ourselves.
It’s easy to do. Particularly with the right structure. There’s something seductive about a grid. It promises that confusion can be managed, that even if you have no idea what something means, you can make it look like you do.
The difference is we rarely have to face that years later.
But doing it in the first place is not ignorance or stupidity. It’s self-preservation. You’re not always in a position to say: “I don’t know what this is yet. Give me five years and a life-changing experience and I’ll come back to you.”
You do what you can with what you have.
***
This can be hard to reconcile.
As a marketer, I’m often asked to describe the steak before tasting it.
Handed bullet points about products I’ve never used, services I’ve never needed, experiences I’ve never had – and asked to write about them in ways that make other people want them.
The first temptation is always the same: reach for clean language, safe claims, defensible structure. Talk about what the thing does rather than what it feels like.
You don’t want to lie, but you don’t know enough truth, so you hedge, gloss, and package it nicely on a double-sided A5.
It can look impressive. But like the catalogue, the result is hollow.
***
Just after I graduated university, I found myself on a 30 hour round trip to Melbourne to see Einstein on the Beach myself.
I had read about the opera. I knew its reputation. And yet, there was that small, persistent doubt on the way there that I was being ridiculous, that no piece of theatre was worth this. That I should have stuck to watching fragments on YouTube like a sensible person.
I was prepared for the facts. But I was unprepared for the feelings. The anticipation as I arrived. The strange dilation of time in the dark. The beat of my heart against a swirl of emotion as I rode the Greyhound, wide-eyed, never-sleeping, through the night toward home.
Some things have to be absorbed as they pass through you. There’s no shortcut.
***
But what if that’you need a shortcut?
Most of the time, you don’t have thirty hours and a budget. The opera’s in another city, the wallet’s run dry, and the deadline is Thursday.
In that case: borrow from the experience of others.
Listening, done properly, is borrowed proximity. You can’t have the experience. But you can catch some of the residue.
So find someone who went. Not to mine them for a testimonial or a star rating, but to sit with them and ask what surprised them — what detail comes back unprompted, what they didn’t expect to feel.
The answers will be messy. They’ll resist the tidy narrative you were hoping to build. That’s how you know you’re getting close.
***
Michael Bierut does not hate the young man who designed that neat three-column grid. The kid just didn’t know any better.
What changes with age is the depth of the reservoir you’re able to draw from. You have more of your own experiences, and you’re better at noticing when those experiences are missing.
Regret, seen this way, is a measure of growth.
The wince of embarrassment when you look back at what you did years ago is a good thing. The worrying reaction would be to never feel regret at all.
