Angus Hyland’s Virginia Woolf Covers Featured in Fast Company
Quick Link: Angus Hyland’s Virginia Woolf Covers Featured in Fast Company
New Work: ‘Material Change’
Founded by the designer Eve Blossom, Lulan Artisans is a pioneering for-profit social venture that designs, produces and markets contemporary textiles made by over 650 weavers, dyers, spinners and finishers in small workshops in Cambodia, India, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Lulan provides workers with fair wages and benefits, creates jobs, preserves artisanal skills and promotes economic stability. The company is built on a sustainable business model that has the potential to change the world.
Pentagram’s Paula Scher and her team have designed Material Change: Design Thinking and the Social Entrepreneurship Movement, a new book by Blossom out now from Metropolis Books. In the book, Blossom chronicles the development of Lulan Artisans, describing her travels to weaving communities in Southeast Asia, how she came to know the artisans and their designs, and how she built a thriving partnership with local co-operatives. At the same time, she describes Lulan as a holistic design solution with a grassroots, bottom-up approach that can be applied to other culturally sustainable enterprises, and introduces other pioneers of social entrepreneurship, including Muna AbuSulayman, Patrick Awuah and Joi Ito. The designer Yves Behar contributes the book’s foreword.
New Work: Virginia Woolf for Penguin
Penguin commissioned Angus Hyland and his team to design a new series of five of Virginia Woolf’s major works in hardback editions. The designs reference authentic period elements but do so in an entirely contemporary manner.
The dust jackets feature abstract compositions in the spirit of the textile designs of the Omega Workshop. The Workshop was founded by members of the Bloomsbury Group who included Woolf herself, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant.
The typography utilises Albertus, designed by Berthold Wolpe, and Gill Sans, designed by Eric Gill, both of whom were British typographers of the period.
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New Work: ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’
On May 25, 2011, Oprah Winfrey ended the incredible 25-year run of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” the television program that inspired millions of people around the world and made her a cultural icon. Pentagram’s Eddie Opara and team have designed The Oprah Winfrey Show: Reflections on an American Legacy, a new commemorative book that celebrates the show and its impact. Published by Abrams, the book is out this week.
Opara and his team designed the book to function as both elegant homage and pop-culture keepsake. The book combines a compelling narrative of the program’s history with 150 archival photographs and essays, testimonials and remembrances by notable personalities about the importance of Winfrey’s work in various social issues. Contributors to the book include Nelson Mandela, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Elie Wiesel, Bono, Ellen DeGeneres and Julia Roberts; alongside figures from Winfrey’s talk show, such as Dr. Phil McGraw and Dr. Mehmet Oz. The design deftly weaves all these elements together with a grace and clarity of composition that reflects one the most influential and beloved figures of our time.
New Work: ‘From Uncertain to Blue’
Pentagram’s DJ Stout has designed hundreds of books over the years, especially photography books, but in 1987 he designed his very first photography monograph, called From Uncertain to Blue. The book was also the first by the photographer, the now-famous Keith Carter, and has become a classic and a collector’s item over time. Now, nearly a quarter century later, Stout, with designer Barrett Fry in Pentagram’s Austin office, has redesigned and completely re-imagined the book for a reissue by the University of Texas Press this fall.
New Work: D&AD Annual
Pentagram’s Harry Pearce was asked by Sanky from AllofUs, last year’s D&AD President, to design the 2011 D&AD Annual.
The heart of Pearce’s idea for the Annual stems from wanting to celebrate the wonderful graphic illusion and quality of the original D&AD mark, which was designed in 1962 by Fletcher Forbes Gill, the studio that later became Pentagram.
The D&AD mark is shown at scale on the Annual’s cover to allow, through a brilliantly intriguing photograph by Richard Foster, an exploration of the unreality of the planes, the spaces and perspectives that lie within the mark’s form. For protection during shipping, the book is encased in an outer carton that also features the mark.
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Pentagram Projects Featured in ‘Graphic Design: Now in Production’
Pentagram is thrilled to have several of our works featured in the major exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production, currently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Organized by Andrew Blauvelt of the Walker and Ellen Lupton of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (where the show travels next summer), Graphic Design: Now in Production looks at the growing reach of graphic design over the past decade—”expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed tool,” in the words of the curators—and the changing role of the designer to producer, author and entrepreneur. The show is the first major U.S. exhibition to focus on graphic design in 15 years, following Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture at the Cooper-Hewitt in 1996 and the Walker’s landmark exhibition Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History in 1989.
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Paula Scher’s “MAPS” on New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix
Quick Link: Paula Scher’s “MAPS” on New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix
New Work: ‘Paula Scher: MAPS’
In the 1990s, Paula Scher began painting colorful typographic maps of the world, its continents, countries, islands, oceans, cities, streets and neighborhoods. Obsessive, opinionated and more than a little personal, the paintings were a reaction against information overload and the constant stream of news, which, like the paintings, present skewed versions of reality in a deceptively authoritative way. The paintings are collected for the first time in Paula Scher: MAPS
MAPS presents 39 paintings, drawings, prints and environmental installations, including Scher’s recent commission for New York City’s Queens Metropolitan Campus. Many of Scher’s original paintings are huge—as tall as 12 feet—and the book reproduces the works in full and in life-size details that reveal layers of hand-painted place names, information and cultural commentary. The book’s jacket folds out into a 3’ by 2’ poster of a portion of World Trade, one of Scher’s most recent paintings, from 2010.
The book opens with an essay by Scher about the influence of her father, a photogrammetic engineer who worked on aerial photography for the U.S. Geological Service in the 1950s and taught her that maps were never totally accurate. (The essay’s title: “All Maps Lie.”) Scher’s father invented a measuring device called Stereo Templates that corrected lens distortions when aerial photography was enlarged for printed maps. Simon Winchester, author of The Map That Changed the World, contributes the book’s foreword, about the charm of maps in the age of GPS.
Tonight Scher will be discussing MAPS at a lecture presented by AIGA/NY at Parsons The New School for Design. The event is sold out. She will be signing copies of the book at a public reception at Rizzoli Bookstore at 31 West 57th Street in New York on Wednesday, October 26 at 5:30 pm.
New Work: ‘High Line’
Since opening in 2009, the High Line, the elevated railway turned public oasis on Manhattan’s West Side, has become one of New York’s most popular parks. It has also become a definitive case study in urban design, inspiring grass-roots movements in other cities to save and re-purpose industrial structures. High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky is a new book by Joshua David and Robert Hammond, the founders of Friends of the High Line, that tells the story of the project. The book is structured as a lively dialogue between David and Hammond, tracing the story from the origins of their idea to save the structure after meeting at a 1999 community hearing about its possible demolition, through the opening of the High Line’s second section this summer.
Pentagram’s Paula Scher has designed the book using the identity and graphics she created for the High Line. Following Davis and Hammond’s narrative, the second half of the book is a portfolio of images from throughout the park’s development. The cover features a debossed image of the logo Scher originally developed for Friends of the High Line, later adopted as the symbol of the park, and the book employs the new NYC Parks green to signal the High Line’s partnership with the city.