Pentagram has been honored by the Art Directors Club with several winners in the ADC 91st Annual Awards, presented last week at a gala in New York.
Three of our projects from the past year received Bronze Cubes: Michael Gericke’s centennial exhibition for the New York Public Library, “Celebrating 100 Years,” received the prize in the Environmental Design category; Angus Hyland’s packaging for Cass Art Own Brand took the award in Package Design; and Domenic Lippa’s design for Circular 17 was selected in Editorial Design.
Last but certainly not least, Pentagram would like to congratulate our good friend Marion Deuchars and longtime client Laurence King Publishing on winning coveted Gold and Silver Cubes for Let’s Make Some Great Art. The Gold was awarded in the Illustration, General Book category, and Deuchars also won a Silver in the Book Design category for her design of the book. Angus Hyland currently serves as Consultant Art Director for Laurence King.
Thanks to all our designers, teams and clients for their great work!
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The Cass Art store on High Street Kensington has revealed a revamped fascia including a window featuring one of this season’s iconic bags which will be available in all five stores across London.
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Pentagram’s Eddie Opara has been named to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, an annual list that celebrates “business innovators who dare to think differently.” The list, published in the magazine’s June issue, out next week, recognizes a wide-ranging group of leaders from the fields of design, technology, advertising, business and entertainment, and Eddie is ranked alongside other innovators including Wes Anderson, Björk and CeeLo Green.
For the issue, Eddie was invited to create an infographic illustrating his process for creating an infographic. The image playfully shows how he turns data into art. “(The illustration) is a library of infographics,” he tells Fast Company. “Too often, people start with a pie or bar chart, but you have to understand the content and patterns in data before throwing images on paper.” Several members of the Pentagram team appear in the infographic, analyzing data and helping the process along. View details after the jump.
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Michael Gericke and his team have designed a new campaign for Top of the Rock, the observation deck at Rockefeller Center.
New York City never looks better than it does from Top of the Rock©, the observation deck at the summit of the landmark 70-story skyscraper 30 Rockefeller Center© in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. The spectacular unobstructed views from Top of the Rock stretch from New York harbor to the south, to Central Park to the north, from the Hudson River to the outer boroughs and beyond.
Pentagram’s Michael Gericke and his team have designed a bold and elegant new advertising campaign and graphic program for Top of the Rock that highlights the amazing one-of-a-kind vistas seen from the deck. The campaign, which will run throughout the year, appears in print advertisements, promotions and websites, and on posters, digital kiosks, banners and buses throughout New York. The campaign is especially visible at Rockefeller Center itself, where the colorful graphics build awareness for the millions of visitors who pass through the center.
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Working in different eras, the Italian designers Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada both subvert contemporary ideals of femininity, beauty and taste in their designs. Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, the spring 2012 exhibition at The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, examines the affinities between the two iconic designers. Opening this week, the exhibition is timed to tonight’s 2012 Costume Institute Gala Benefit, the Met’s biggest event of the year. The show opens to the public on Thursday and remains on view through August 19, 2012.
Pentagram’s Abbott Miller has designed a catalogue for the exhibition that uniquely captures and extends the show’s juxtaposition of the two designers. The book presents over 200 archival and newly photographed images of the designers’ work, and includes a smaller “book within a book” that features the “impossible conversations” between the two women. Schiaparelli and Prada both share a love of Surrealism and surprise, and the book itself has been conceived as an unusual object that constructs a playful dialogue of images and commentary between two designers who never actually met.
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This summer a new kind of hero will appear on the New York cityscape: Meet Wendy, a big, blue, star-shaped superstructure treated with smog-eating, air-cleansing titania nanoparticles. Designed by the architects HWKN (Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner, who also founded Architizer), Wendy is this year’s winner of the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program and will be installed in the courtyard of PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, where it will be used for the museum’s popular Warm Up! summer series of dance parties and performances. Once in place, Wendy will help scrub the air of particulates and pollution—projected to be the equivalent of taking 260 cars off the road during the installation’s three-month run.
Pentagram’s Natasha Jen was one of three designers invited by HWKN to create tote bags and t-shirts to help Wendy’s cause. Like Wendy, the products have been treated with titania nanoparticles that absorb pollutants from the air. All profits from sales of the totes and t-shirts will go to helping build and maintain Wendy at PS1 this summer. 2×4 and Bruce Mau Design also contributed designs to the series.
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Founded in 1754, Columbia University is the fifth oldest school in the United States, a distinguished member of the Ivy League and one of the world’s most innovative research universities. It is also one of New York’s principal institutions—recognized in its official name, Columbia University in the City of New York—with a 27-acre urban campus in Morningside Heights that is home to nearly all the university’s undergraduate student body and comprises a kind of “college town” in the city. At the same time signature Columbia programs like the World Leaders Forum and a growing network of Global Centers look beyond New York.
Pentagram’s Luke Hayman and team have developed a comprehensive program of admissions materials for the university. The program is designed to help position Columbia as forward-looking and contemporary––less as a tradition-bound Ivy League school and more as a dynamic, modern university and vibrant academic community within the larger fabric of the city.
Working closely with Columbia’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions, the designers created a coordinated system of books and brochures that presents a cohesive but varied portrait of the school. The pieces range from a viewbook for prospective students to a welcome brochure for incoming freshmen to booklets for specific programs in engineering and science.
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Pentagram partner DJ Stout and Lippincott’s Su Mathews, a former Pentagram Associate, co-chaired this year’s national AIGA Medalist gala, “Bright Lights! Big City”, held on April 19 at the historic Altman Building in New York. The annual event celebrates those whose creativity, inspiration, innovation and brilliant execution have defined graphic design. The AIGA Medal, the most distinguished honor in the profession, is awarded to designers who have set standards of excellence over a lifetime of work since 1920. This year’s honorees were Ralph Caplan, Elaine Lustig Cohen, Armin Hofmann and Robert Vogele.
Stout and his team at Pentagram Austin devised this year’s theme, “Bright Lights! Big City,” which drew inspiration from the Beaux Arts Ball, a costume party originating in the Ecole des Beaux Arts, or the School of Fine Arts, in 19th century Paris. The first Beaux Arts Balls featured extravagant allegorical floats that circled the Ecole’s ballroom and then were judged by a panel of designers at the end of the evening. Such rituals influenced the fathers of Modernism in New York City who began to stage similar soirees. One of the most famous of the annual events was held in 1931 when the architects of several iconic Manhattan skyscrapers, including the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, attended the ball dressed up as the very buildings they had designed.
“I’ve always been amused by those vintage black-and-white photographs with the partygoers dressed up like buildings,” says Stout. “That looked like one hell of a party! The name of last year’s gala was Bright Lights so we just suggested tagging on the words Big City—primarily so we could have fun with the Beaux Arts Ball motif.”
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The Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra (Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg or the OPL) is the national orchestra of Luxembourg. Its home is the Philharmonie Luxembourg, a modern concert hall in the northeastern part of Luxembourg City. Lead by music director Emmanuel Krivine, the OPL has positioned itself as a cultural ambassador of Luxembourg and, with some 100 musicians in the company, strives to be the number one orchestra in the region.
Pentagram partner Justus Oehler, who developed the identity for the Philharmonie Luxembourg in 2005, was commissioned to design the Orchestra’s new identity with the goal of making the OPL an internationally recognised brand.
The new mark is comprised of four overlapping transluscent colour rings (cyan, green, magenta and yellow), resulting in a multi-colour blossom-like symbol that forms the shape of the letter O. The identity brings a sense of energy, diversity, fun and passion to the OPL brand.
Oehler’s Berlin Team will be implementing the recently launched design across all media, including stationery items, programme leaflets, brochures and posters.
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A family business founded in 1931, Mohawk is North America’s largest privately owned manufacturer of fine papers and envelopes. The paper business has changed enormously in recent years, with revolutions in digital technology transforming the ways people use paper. To meet this challenge, Mohawk is leveraging connections in the digital, design and photo spaces to develop new web-based offerings. This week the company launches a dynamic new identity system designed by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and his team that helps reinvent Mohawk for the digital world.
The new mark is based on the letter M. The logo serves as a monogram for the name Mohawk, but is also inspired by the papermaking process and the printmaking process, both of which involve paper moving around cylinders. The forms of the logo suggest paper rolls, printing presses and circuit boards, as well as the idea of connection and communication, the core functions of paper. “Whether it’s for a small book of family photos or a brochure for a giant corporation, it’s all about communication,” says Bierut. Applied to advertising, swatchbooks, brochures and ream wraps, the logo is a building block in a flexible branding system that includes more than a dozen color variations and countless patterns based on the mark.
The identity is the third Pentagram has created for Mohawk in the past 20 years, following logos designed in 1991 and 2002. Bierut and designers Katie Barcelona, Joe Marianek and Aron Fay worked closely with longtime client Laura Shore, Senior VP of Communications at Mohawk, to develop the identity, visual system, and campaign tagline, “What Will You Make Today?” The identity is accompanied by the launch of a new website, MohawkConnects.com.
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