Michael Gericke

Michael Gericke (born 1956) is an American graphic designer.

Gericke was born in 1956 in Madison, Wisconsin. He studied visual communications and graphic design at the University of Wisconsin and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1978. In 2010, he received the University's Distinguished Alumni Award.

Gericke worked initially for Communication Arts of Boulder, Colorado, where he produced many projects combining graphics with three-dimensional design. Since 1985, Gericke has been a principal of the New York office of Pentagram.

He is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), admitted in 1998. His work is in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the AIGA Design Archives at the Denver Art Museum, the Poster Museum, Wilanów in Warsaw, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, and the Museum of Design, Zürich.

Gericke has created projects for international clients, institutions, public agencies and cultural organizations. His graphic images are noted for their simplicity and broad appeal. Architecture and design critic Paul Goldberger writes: "What ties Gericke's images together, beyond their inherent formal elegance, is a sense that he comes to every problem fresh and searches to find the essential qualities of the object he is representing."

Gericke designed the iconographic logo for One Laptop per Child, the non-profit organization with the goal of empowering the world’s poorest children by providing them with low-cost, low-power, connected laptop computers. The identity is a hieroglyph, designed to be universally understood by any culture, independent of language.

In 1998, Gericke created, for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the name, logo and visual identity for the two AirTrain systems in the New York metropolitan area. Both the name and symbol describe the nature of the transport system: being the train to the plane.

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