Michael Vanderbyl was born February 9, 1947, in Oakland, California.
[3][4] Vanderbyl was one of the artists in the early 1980s that helped establish the San Francisco Bay Area as a center of the postmodern movement in graphic design.
In the early 1980s a few San Francisco–based designers were nicknamed “The Michaels” because they all had the same name (Vanderbyl alongside, Cronan, Mabry, Manwaring, Schwab), and later they were known as the "[[Pacific Wave]]" according to historian Steven Heller.
[8] He has designed products for, among others, McGuire Furniture,[9] and HBF.
He was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Interior Design Association (IIDA) in 2006.