On Thursday, January 22nd, I'll be hosting a conversation with Nate DeMayo of the Memory Palace at KQED in San Francisco.

I could not be more of a fan of Nate in his writing, which is the best in all of podcasting.

Please come see us and say hi. Again, that's the Memory Palace live at KQED in San Francisco on Thursday, January 22nd.

We'll have a link to tickets in the show notes.

This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

Michael Beirut is one of the best known designers in America.

You probably interact with design from Michael and his team every day.

Like the Verizon V checkmark,

or the logos for Yahoo and Slack, or redesigns for brands like MasterCard, Sacks 5th Avenue,

and the New York Jets. Michael even designed the logo for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign,

that H with the horizontal arrow for the crossbar. But before all that, in 1985, Michael Beirut was 27 years old and early in his career.

He was working at the firm founded by legendary designer Massimo Vignale.

One day, Michael was handed an assignment that seemed pretty straightforward.

The International Design Center of New York had two events coming up, and they wanted Michael

to create the invitations.

One was going to be an exhibition of what they thought of then say as avant-garde furniture,

dramatic-shaped chairs.

They could have, like, slender little feet that would terminate in bright colored teal

balls, you know, if you can picture that?

I don't know.

Then the other thing was a lecture by some scientists from NASA from the space program who were

...