Michael bierut light years

Graphic design plays a sinister supporting role in Steven Soderbergh’s film Side Effects (2012), starring Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Mara plays an emotionally distressed junior designer with problems much bigger than kerning type.

Slammed with depression, her professional life rapidly falls apart in several crucial scenes that were shot in the New York offices of Pentagram, the international design firm. Among the works on view in the office is a mysterious poster whose overlapping letters emerge from darkness; Mara rushes past it not once but twice to violently puke in the bathroom.

The bathroom does not belong to Pentagram, but the poster in the hallway most certainly does.

Michael bierut light years

It is Michael Bierut’s 1999 piece Light Years, created for the Architectural League of New York’s annual Beaux Arts Ball. While sketching and playing with the text, Bierut noticed that “light” and “years” are both five-letter words.

It occurred to him to run one word