One of Michael Bierut’s most well-known works is his redesign of the Big Ten college athletic conference. The conference needed a new logo after it added it’s twelfth team to the conference. For a while previously, the conference had eleven teams which they had acknowledged in their logo by hiding an “11” in the negative space. But with adding a twelfth team neither of the numbers in the logo were going to be accurate anymore. This brand needed a redesign and that’s when Bierut stepped in. He and his design partner settled on keeping the use of negative space by keeping the word “BIG” and hiding the 10 within the I and G. From a technical perspective this is a very clever and honorable redesign. They kept creative elements from the past logo while updating the logo for its namesake and not the accuracy of teams in the conference. The updated logo is clever because it points out the similarities in forms between the “10” and the “IG”. Just like most of Bierut’s work, it is simple and clean. It exposes rules in forms that are usually ignored. Over time, the logo became very successful. But that’s not how it was initially received. Bierut says that initially the responses to the updated logo were overwhelmingly negative [2]. However, Bierut found light in all of this, he was flattered that people took the time and energy to write him their thoughts about the change, even if they were negative. And he felt that they deserved a response. Most people he wrote back to were surprised to hear from anyone. Bierut notes here that this was because most people never realized it led back to a single person, and especially that that person cared about hearing their opinion [1]. The lesson to be learned in all of this is that it’s important to build relationships with the people you are designing for, no matter how small. Audiences are more receptive and understanding when they can put a person to the work. 

 

Bibliography

Bierut, Michael. Now You See It. Princeton Architectural Press, 2017.

Mars, Roman. “99 Percent Invisible.” 99 Percent Invisible, Radiotopia, 14 Mar. 2017, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/negative-space-logo-design-michael-bierut/transcript/.

Image: https://www.logolynx.com/topic/big+ten