Harry Pearce and his team have designed the logo for a new YouTube channel, Human Rights, a collaboration between WITNESS, a human rights organisation and Storyful, a content verifier. The Human Rights channel features user-generated content, curated by WITNESS showing some of the most effecting footage from around the world.
Pearce and his team also created the above ident to be used at the beginning of every video that is uploaded to the channel. Because all footage uploaded is user-generated, the purpose of the ident is to give all the disparate footage unity, context and an identity.
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Launched by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in 2009 to spotlight New York as a global hub for technology and creativity, NYC BigApps is an annual competition that invites software developers and members of the public to create web or mobile applications that address major issues facing New York City residents, using official city data made accessible through the NYC Open Data initiative. The competition is co-sponsored by the NYC Economic Development Corporation and the NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, and is powered by CollabFinder, an online platform that allows users to post project ideas and team up to build apps. In its first three editions, BigApps has helped create nearly 240 useful apps, including WayFinder NYC, Taxihack, Sportaneous, and Parking Finder.
Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Jesse Reed have designed a new identity for BigApps, introduced with this year’s competition. The name “BigApps” is a play on “Big Apple,” and the new identity suggests the form and colors of an apple, as well as a pie chart, emphasizing the competition’s roots in information.
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Quick Link: “Web Design at Its Best”: This American Life Website Featured on It’s Nice That
Each week “This American Life” presents funny, thought-provoking and relatable first-person narratives on the American experience read by the authors themselves. Hosted by Ira Glass, the show’s creator and producer, “TAL” is syndicated by Public Radio International on over 500 public radio stations across the country and has an audience of 1.8 million listeners. The show has introduced the distinctive voices (literally) of writers like Sarah Vowell, David Sedaris and David Rakoff, and has expanded into live tours, books, television and films, like Mike Birbiglia’s current “Sleepwalk with Me.”
“This American Life” is also the most popular podcast in the nation, and the show’s website is an important part of its reach. Pentagram’s Emily Oberman and Naz Sahin have updated the TAL website with an accessible, playful design that matches the show’s smart, friendly sensibility. The refresh improves navigation, adds new ways to search the show’s archive, and makes the site more dimensional with added use of color. The update builds on the TAL identity and previous version of the site designed by Oberman at Number Seventeen. Oberman and Sahin worked closely with Ira Glass and TAL director of operations Seth Lind on the project, which includes a new user interface created by Liz Danzico.
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Quick Link: Science Friday Website is Communication Arts Webpick of the Day
In 1970, Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green Beret doctor stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was accused of the brutal killing of his pregnant wife and two young daughters, a crime he attributed to intruders. He was convicted, but has always maintained his innocence. In A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris presents 20 years of his own investigation into one of America’s most infamous murder cases. Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and his team have designed the book, out September 4, as well as a promotional online trailer and accompanying website.
Pentagram designed Morris’s previous book, Believing Is Seeing (2011), which examined the mysteries behind several famous photographs. For A Wilderness of Error, Bierut and designer Yve Ludwig worked closely with Morris to develop a design that eschews the typically lurid look of “true crime,” in favor of simple line drawings in stark black and white to convey the in-depth analysis of Morris’s arguments as well as the horror and notoriety of the case.
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The Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is one of the most unique and beautiful art museums in the U.S. Located at Villa Philbrook, a 72-room Italian Renaissance-style home and 23 acres of gardens built in 1927 by oilman Waite Phillips, the museum is a cultural center of the city. Next year the Philbrook will expand to a new location in Tulsa’s historic downtown Brady District, the city’s growing arts area. Designed by Gluckman Mayner Architects, the 30,000-square-foot expansion will be housed in the industrial former home of the Tulsa Paper Company and will feature the Philbrook’s holdings in modern and contemporary art and design––including the remarkable George R. Kravis II Design Collection of 20th and 21st century design––as well as its world-class collection of Native American art.
To coincide with the expansion, Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and his team have created a brand identity for the Philbrook that puts an iconic new “face” on the institution. At the same time, Eddie Opara and his team have designed a new website for the museum that makes its collections more accessible to the public. Throughout the process, Pentagram worked with the Museum’s staff as well as with trustee George Kravis, who served as the project’s “guardian angel.”
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Science coverage in the media often seems threatening—dire warnings of global warming, potentially poisonous foods, and dangerous technology. But science doesn’t have to be scary. Science Friday, the weekly call-in talk show that is part of NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” radio programming, is dedicated to presenting an accessible, exciting, positive view of science. Founded and hosted by the award-winning science journalist Ira Flatow, the show, known as SciFri for short, has as its motto “Making Science User Friendly.” Pentagram’s Emily Oberman has created a bold, fun identity and website for SciFri that helps promote a sense of wonder about science and all it can do.
The new SciFri identity creates an iconic brand that is playful but not childlike. Quirky, friendly and welcoming, the identity is built around the shape of the hexagon—the symbol used in scientific diagramming of chemical compounds. The identity is complemented by the redesigned SciFri website, a clean, simple gateway to a wide-ranging world of scientific information. SciFri is available as a podcast and is one of the most popular iTunes downloads, and the new site is designed to look at home on smartphones, tablets and mobile devices.
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Home to masterworks by Cezanne, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, and others, the Barnes Foundation is one of the most important collections of Post-Impressionist and early Modernist art in the world. Now, as the Barnes prepares for a high-profile move from Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, to a new location in downtown Philadelphia, the museum has announced a comprehensive new identity program designed by Pentagram’s Abbott Miller. The graphic identity has been introduced with the launch of a new website designed by Miller and his team for the Foundation, which had its Phase 1 launch last week. The museum opens to the public in May 2012.
Established by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a visionary who amassed paintings, decorative art, and African sculpture (before it was widely collected by other institutions), the Barnes Foundation has been housed since 1922 in a custom gallery in Merion designed to Barnes’ specifications. The galleries of the original building were intimate settings that presented art and objects from various parts of the world in distinctive symmetrical “ensembles,” a hanging style that allowed viewers to make links and associations among the diverse works. These arrangements will be recreated in exact detail in the Barnes’ new building, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and have inspired Miller’s identity for the museum.
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Robert A.M. Stern may be known as a pioneering postmodernist, but the term doesn’t begin to cover the stylistic versatility and wide-ranging output of his architectural practice. Among different audiences, Robert A.M. Stern Architects is known equally for everything from the design of houses and apartment buildings, to the design of office towers, academic buildings, and whole towns. Pentagram’s Michael Bierut has designed a new website for RAMSA that captures the firm’s expansive portfolio.
Bierut has a longstanding relationship with Stern, having designed a series of five monographs on the architect’s work, beginning with Robert A.M. Stern Buildings in 1996, followed by Houses (1997), Houses and Gardens (2005), Buildings and Towns (2007), and On Campus (2010). The distinctive design of the books reflects Stern’s own architectural approach—the contemporary interpretation of classical forms in a confident, even monumental form. Bierut has also designed two books of architectural writing by Stern, The Philip Johnson Tapes and Architecture on the Edge of Postmodernism.
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