04.05.17
Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand | Audio

S2E6: Michael Rock


Michael Rock is founding partner and creative director of 2x4, a global design consultancy that has worked with brands including Nike, Prada, Target, and Kanye West.

Rock talks about branding in relationship to religious and political belief systems, and how something as “seemingly quotidian as signage” can frame how you move of the world:
When you’re on the U.S. highway system, and you see these big green signs and that assures you that you’re in the jurisdiction of the United States Government. And when you veer off that to some unmarked road, you suddenly become anxious.
This framing, he says, is “the essence of what design does.”


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Posted in: Design of Business | Business of Design




Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

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