The second edition of luxury gentlemen’s magazine road book has just been published in locations across Asia. Angus Hyland and his team have rebranded and redesigned Roadbook, relaunching the first edition of the magazine April (link to previous post). The bi-monthly magazine is aimed at high net worth individuals and features classic and contemporary cars, timepieces, fashion and more.
Pentagram’s Paula Scher will be honored tonight at the 45th Anniversary Gala of CITYarts, the New York-based organization dedicated to empowering youth to transform their communities and their lives through the creation of public art. Scher will receive the organization’s Artistic Brick Award in recognition of her design achievement and dedication to public art. This year’s gala celebrates “The Marriage of Art and Science to Inspire Leaders of the Next Generation,” and other award recipients include Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation and past recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Leland Melvin, associate administrator for NASA and former astronaut.
Scher has designed graphics for several schools in the New York area. She completed a pair of large-scale murals at the Queens Metropolitan Campus in Forest Hills, Queens, as part of a commission for the Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art program, in partnership with the NYC School Construction Authority Public Art for Public Schools program. Other educational institutions she has designed graphics for include Excellence Charter School in Bedford Stuyvesant, Achievement First Endeavor Middle School in Clinton Hill, and most recently, PAVE Academy Charter School in Red Hook.
Congratulations, Paula!
Predating both Central Park and Prospect Park, Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn was one of the most important landscapes of the 19th century, ultimately influencing the rise of public parks and green space in the US. Pentagram’s Abbott Miller has designed A Beautiful Way to Go: New York’s Green-Wood Cemetery, a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York that commemorates the 175th anniversary of this national historic landmark. The show opens this week and remains on view through September 15.
Established in 1838 in what was then a rural area of the city, Green-Wood is a bucolic 478-acre landscape of rolling hills, gentle ponds, meandering paths and striking Gothic Revival architecture that was for a time the most popular tourist attraction in the country. Visitors enjoyed the beautiful natural setting and saw the cemetery as a place of repose and relaxation. Green-Wood eventually inspired the design of Central Park and Prospect Park, as well as the creation of the first suburb, Llewelyn Park in New Jersey.
Miller’s exhibition design creates a continuous environmental surface from historic maps of the cemetery. Museum visitors navigate the exhibition encountering objects and stories of Green-Wood’s most famous “residents” that are positioned according to their location within the landscape.
The 83rd International Geneva Motor Show was a landmark event for Rolls Royce, with the launch of their new Wraith, which the carmaker calls the “most potent and technologically advanced” in its history. Justus Oehler and his team designed the customer experience for their exhibition space, building on his work with the company over the last two years and creating a narrative and a monolithic expression for the brand, encapsulating style and elegance.
The space was multifaceted, featuring a large lounge with a seating and bar area, an atelier, a sales area and glass cabinets with after-sales items. All areas were gathered around a Rolls-Royce car, a focal point in the space. Oehler designed the atelier shelves, with all its original pieces sourced from the Rolls-Royce workshops and factory. He also designed the information graphics and selected the materials needed to develop the overall look and feel of the space, collaborating with Puchner P3 architects based in Munich.
The searchlights of Twentieth Century Fox are one of the most recognized icons in the world. Pentagram’s Michael Gericke and Emily Oberman have drawn on this rich heritage and Fox’s contemporary innovations in media to create the logo and develop the name for 21st Century Fox. The new media and entertainment company will be established following the proposed separation of News Corporation into two companies. 21st Century Fox will serve as the umbrella company for Twentieth Century Fox and the rest of the group’s entertainment and media properties, all of which will retain their existing well-known names and logos.
Pentagram worked closely with the 21st Century Fox team on the development of the identity, which is designed to honor the creative legacy of Twentieth Century Fox and celebrate the company’s vital future. The name and symbol distill the elements of Fox’s familiar searchlights-and-monument logo into a dynamic new identity. The 21st Century Fox logo features a pair of sweeping searchlights that suggest entertainment, broadcasting and limitless possibilities within a circle shape inspired by a lens. Iconic and distinctive, the symbol is accompanied by a wordmark set in strong, stacked lettering that is derived from the typographic pedestal of the Twentieth Century Fox logo and Fox Broadcasting’s wordmark.
Pentagram is thrilled to announce that our partner Paula Scher has been selected to receive the 2013 National Design Award for Communication Design. The National Design Awards celebrate outstanding achievement and innovation in design and are sponsored by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. First Lady Michelle Obama serves as the Honorary Patron for this year’s awards, and the recipients will be honored at a gala on October 17 in New York, in conjunction with National Design Week.
Scher has been at the forefront of graphic design for over four decades. Bold, smart and accessible, her images have entered the American vernacular. She has created identity and branding systems, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs for clients that include Bloomberg, Citibank, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Bausch + Lomb, the Museum of Modern Art, the Public Theater, the High Line, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the New York Philharmonic, and Jazz at Lincoln Center, among many, many others. She was previously a Finalist in the Communication Design category in 2005 and 2007.
Congratulations, Paula!
Partner DJ Stout and designer Carla Delgado in Pentagram’s Austin office have recently completed a new identity and a rebranding of Oklahoma City University (OCU). The private urban college, located in the Uptown District of its namesake city, is affiliated with the United Methodist Church and offers a wide variety of degrees in the liberal arts, fine arts, science and business. The only Oklahoma institution listed in the top tier of the regional, master’s-level university category by U.S. News and World Report, OCU is also listed in Forbes’ “Best Christian Colleges” and “100 Best College Buys.”
Oklahoma City University is also known for its top-notch dance, music and theater programs and its impressive track-record of placing graduates in Broadway musicals and theatrical productions, most notably in the lineups of the Radio City Rockettes. In addition to its performing arts prowess OCU is renowned for its many beauty pageant contestants, contributing $2.2 million in educational scholarships to more than 340 pageant contestants over the last 55 years. Fondly dubbed “Miss America U” for its tradition of winning pageants, OCU boasts 24 Miss Oklahomas and holds the record for Miss America winners. A larger than life-size bronze statue portraying the school’s three former Miss Americas—Jane Jayroe, Susan Powell and Shawntel Smith—stands guard at the entrance to the campus.
Punk’s iconoclastic aesthetic was originally rooted in street culture, but its subversive style has had an enduring influence on high fashion. This impact is explored in PUNK: Chaos to Couture, the spring 2013 exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The show juxtaposes original punk garments from the mid-1970s with more recent fashion to illustrate how haute couture and ready-to-wear have borrowed punk’s visual symbols, and how designers continue to extend the visual language of punk by merging social realism with artistic expression. Pentagram’s Abbott Miller has designed a catalogue for the exhibition that captures the immediacy of the subject in a format inspired by the 12” LP cover.
The exhibition, one of the most highly anticipated of the season, will be celebrated at next Monday’s 2013 Costume Institute Gala Benefit, the Met’s biggest event of the year. (Joining Vogue’s Anna Wintour as co-chairs this year are Beyoncé, Givenchy “New Goth” designer Riccardo Tisci, and “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and recent Pentagram actor Rooney Mara.) The show opens to the public on May 9 and will be on view through August 14, 2013.
As part of the launch of Fontsmith’s new sans serif font, FS Emeric, design studios around the world invited make a poster. The brief was to use a single weight of the typeface to create a poster that would embody the three words that best represent its character – optimistic, adventurous and ambitious.
Pentagram partner Domenic Lippa took on the brief, creating a poster which shows the full-stop of the core weight of FS Emeric at 11,750 pt. Lippa says, “We didn’t want to over-design it so we took the most simplistic, smallest element of the typeface, the full stop, and enlarged it so it became a graphic shape in itself. The idea of the poster was also a statement: FS Emeric, fullstop.”
“The grid is an integral part of book design,” says the incomparable Massimo Vignelli. “It’s not something that you see. It’s just like underwear: you wear it, but it’s not to be exposed. The grid is the underwear of the book.”
Vignelli’s approach to book design is the subject of a new video created by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Aron Fay for “What Will You Make Today?” campaign from Mohawk. In the video, Vignelli discusses his use of the grid as the basis for the layout of a book’s pages, using one of his classic book designs for the architect Richard Meier as an example. Working with an audio interview edited by Hilary Frank, Bierut and Fay animated Vignelli’s sketches for the clip, taking them from skeletal grid to finished publication.
Bierut knew Vignelli’s painstaking step-by-step process well. “Because I worked with Massimo for ten years before joining Pentagram, I was very familiar with his unique way of designing books. He sits with all the ingredients—text and images—and draws each page with a pencil, including every photograph, using a grid as a layout guide,” he says.
The video is accompanied by a small limited edition journal that reproduces Vignelli’s grid from the film. The journal is available from Mohawk’s website, while supplies last.
