This fall the Public Theater opens a major revitalization of its New York home that will transform the institution’s lobby into a public piazza and gathering space. For the Public, the update marks not just a time to renovate the space, but an opportunity to reinvigorate its messaging. Pentagram’s Paula Scher has designed a bold institutional campaign for the Public that celebrates its status as a theater for the “public.” The campaign launched with a full-page print advertisement in this Sunday’s New York Times.
A diverse cultural institution, the Public is the only theater that produces Shakespeare and the classics, musicals, contemporary and experimental pieces—works with social relevance, dealing with real topics, that also provide uplifting entertainment. In the words of Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, “The Public Theater is, and always has been, for the people.” Themed “Public Open,” the fall campaign celebrates the institution as a whole and reaffirms the Public’s tradition of merging art and popular taste. The campaign promotes the various components of programming at the Public, including Shakespeare in the Park, Public Lab, Joe’s Pub, the annual Under the Radar Festival, the Public Forum, the Emerging Writers Group and the Mobile Unit.
Continue reading “New Work: The Public Theater 2012-13 Season Campaign”
For the sixth year running, Pentagram’s Domenic Lippa and his team have created the visual identity and promotional materials for the London Design Festival, one of the biggest events in the design industry.
Lippa says, “Yet again its been a pleasure to have collaborated with the London Design Festival on this year’s graphics, but in particular working with Ben Evans and John Sorrell. The theme for this year was an obvious decision considering it is the Festival’s tenth year. As with previous years we collectively agreed on a strong and bold execution of the theme by just concentrating on different ways of saying 10 – whether by using the numerals, symbol or the word itself.”
Continue reading “New Work: London Design Festival 2012″
Tonight Rockefeller Center rolls out the red carpet for Fashion’s Night Out, the annual celebration of fashion and design at stores around the world. Pentagram’s Michael Gericke and his team have designed an elegant promotional campaign for the event, which will transform Rockefeller Center into a red carpet experience with live music and a fashion show highlighting clothing and accessories from the Center’s specialty stores. The graphics feature Rockefeller Center’s iconic architecture conceptually paired with fashion-related symbols. Pentagram developed the campaign with Tishman Speyer, who own and manage Rockefeller Center.
Continue reading “New Work: Fashion’s Night Out at Rockefeller Center”
To celebrate the Olympic Games, Pentagram’s Angus Hyland, Domenic Lippa and Marina Willer have all designed posters as part of ‘Fit’, an initiative by Central St Martin’s. The group show, curated by Jonathan Barnbrook and Vaughan Oliver, was created to showcase London 2012-inspired posters by contemporary British-based graphic designers.
Continue reading “Hyland, Lippa and Willer: all Fit”
‘Make Tea Not War’ was the headline of a placard created by Naresh Ramchandani’s previous agency Karmarama to arm protesters in London’s anti-war march of 2003. Naresh’s agency wanted to create something that expressed how they felt about Blair’s determination to invade Iraq, so they took a cut-out of Blair in a prime ministerial suit, put a kalashnikov in his hands, a tea cup on his head, added four naive words and printed a thousand placards.
Continue reading “From the Archive: Make Tea Not War”
Pentagram was founded 40 years ago today, on June 12, 1972, in London by the designers Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, Theo Crosby, Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky. The company was formed when Pentagram’s predecessor, Crosby Fletcher Forbes, added two new partners, Grange and Kurlansky, expanding the multi-disciplinary partnership to five.
For the anniversary the 19 current Pentagram partners, under the creative direction of Harry Pearce, have designed a series of posters for the 40 years since Pentagram’s birth. Each partner created posters for two or three different years, and the only parameters for the series were the use of black, white and red (Pentagram Warm Red, of course). The subjects range from significant historic or cultural landmarks—see Paula Scher’s tribute to the 1977 New York blackout, Daniel Weil’s depiction of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Emily Oberman’s salute to the 1991 release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, or Luke Hayman’s take on the 2008 financial crisis—to events in Pentagram’s history, like the founding of Pentagram Berlin in 2002, commemorated in a poster by the office’s partner, Justus Oehler. Some partners take an illustrative approach. In her three posters, Natasha Jen, working with Pentagram designer Jin Kwang Kim, has created landscapes featuring iconic Pentagram projects. (In a demonstration of Pentagram’s longevity, Jen, the company’s most recent partner, designed the poster for the year 1973, which predates her birth.) In his poster for 1982, DJ Stout depicts the company as a collection of chairs, offering a “seat at the table” for designers for 40 years.
The posters are presented in a special newspaper produced by Newspaper Club that was given away as a gift at our recent 40th anniversary party in London. The anniversary has also been commemorated in “The Forty Story,” the short film created by Naresh Ramchandani.
Here’s to 40 more!
Continue reading “Forty Posters for Forty Years”
Fifty years ago this summer Joseph Papp, the founder of the Public Theater and New York Shakespeare Festival, took his free performances of Shakespeare “into the woods” of Central Park to the Delacorte, the Public’s amphitheater in the park. The Delacorte first opened on June 18, 1962, and over the past five decades over 5 million people have enjoyed more than 100 productions presented at the theater.
To celebrate the anniversary, the Public is mounting two forest-oriented productions for this year’s Shakespeare in the Park: “As You Like It,” Shakespeare’s romantic comedy that takes place in enchanted Forest of Arden, and “Into the Woods,” a new staging of Stephen Sondheim’s classic 1986 musical starring Amy Adams, Denis O’Hare and Donna Murphy. Pentagram’s Paula Scher has designed the festival campaign, which launched this past weekend with a full-page ad in The New York Times and will be seen in posters going up this week in the streets, subways and buses of New York, along with a program of signage at the Delacorte.
Scher started designing the posters for Shakespeare in the Park in 1994, and her 18th campaign represents a departure from the graphic language of past seasons. This year’s campaign, designed with Kirstin Huber, the Public’s in-house graphic designer, has a looser feel than past posters—it’s fun, celebratory, and purely about the park. The tagline of “Shakespeare and Sondheim in the Park” appears in a large swath of verdant green with a rough edge that evokes trees and greenery. Smaller typographic elements diagram a kind of journey through the woods, with bits of information pointing out a path through the green.
Continue reading “New Work: Shakespeare in the Park 2012″
Like Pentagram, the AIGA New York Chapter is celebrating a milestone birthday this year. Founded in 1982, the chapter has been supporting New York’s design community for the past 30 years, and in honor of the anniversary, 30 designers were asked to create commemorative posters for the organization. Pentagram’s Michael Bierut, Emily Oberman and Paula Scher joined 27 other designers in creating limited edition posters to benefit the chapter. The posters are available for purchase on Etsy, including copies signed by the designers.
Continue reading “Happy 30th Anniversary, AIGA/NY!”
Harry Pearce has designed a limited edition poster which was given away at his sold out talk for The Typographic Circle last week at JWT in Knightsbridge.
The poster illustrates the title of the talk – Typographic Tapestry – a typographic journey through Pearce’s life and work.
Lithography was kindly provided by Gavin Martin Colournet and Phoenixmotion Xenon paper supplied by GF Smith.
Project Team: Harry Pearce, partner-in-charge and designer, Diogo Soares, designer
The 62nd Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale, wrapped this week following a program of over 400 films, many of them premieres. Each year the Berlinale also presents the Retrospective, a showcase of historical film that runs alongside the main festival and is curated in cooperation with the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen. This year the Museum asked Justus Oehler and his team in Pentagram’s Berlin office to create the graphics for the Retrospective. Oehler previously designed the identity for the Museum in 2006 and has since created numerous posters and campaigns for the institution and its exhibitions.
The Retrospective is always dedicated to an important but lesser-known director or period of film history and helps bring German and international film back to the big screen, often in restored prints. Titled Die Traumfabrik (The Red Dream Factory), the Retrospective program of the 2012 Berlinale has rediscovered the legendary German-Russian film studio Mezhrabpom-Film and its German branch, Prometheus, which operated from 1922 to 1936. The graphics designed by Oehler make use of an iconic black-and-white still of the Soviet movie Okraina (directed by Boris Barnet in 1933), combined with large, distinctive typography inspired by the Museum für Film und Fernsehen identity.
The Red Dream Factory program will travel to the Museum of Modern Art in New York this April in a new partnership between the Berlinale Retrospective and MoMA.
Continue reading “New Work: Berlinale Retrospective”
